Prolog om betydelsen av ordet ortodoxi. (Ur "Heretics", 1900)

Ingenting kan mer slående avslöja vårt moderna samhälles enorma och tysta onda än den extraordinära användning som nuförtiden görs av ordet “ortodox”. I gångna tider var kättaren stolt över att inte vara kättare. Det var världens kungarike och polisen och domstolarna som var kättare. Han var ortodox. Han var inte stolt över att ha gjort uppror mot dem; de hade gjort uppror mot honom. Arméerna med all sin grymma säkerhet, kungarna med sina kalla ansikten, Statens pompösa processer, lagens förnuftiga processer - alla dessa var som vilsegångna får. Mannen var stolt över att vara ortodox, stolt över att ha rätt. Om han stod ensam i en öde vildmark var han mer än en människa, han var en kyrka. Han var universums centrum, det var kring honom stjärnorna svingade sej. Ingen tortyr hämtad från glömda helveten kunde få honom att erkänna att han var kättare.

Men några få moderna fraser har fått honom att skryta med det. Han säger, med ett självmedvetet skratt: “Jag antar att jag är väldigt kättersk”, och ser sej omkring efter applåder. Ordet “kättersk” har inte bara slutat betyda att ha fel - det betyder i praktiken att vara klartänkt och modig. Ordet “ortodox” har inte bara slutat betyda att ha rätt; det betyder i praktiken att ha fel.

Allt detta kan betyda en sak, och bara en sak. Det betyder att människor bryr sej mindre om huruvida de har rätt filosofiskt sett. För uppenbarligen borde en människa erkänna sej vara galen hellre än att erkänna sej vara kättersk. Dynamitarden som lägger ut en bomb borde känna att han, vad han än annars må vara, åtminstone är ortodox.

Det är, allmänt talat, idiotiskt av en filosof att bränna upp en annan filosof på torget för att de inte är överens om teorin om universum. Detta gjordes mycket ofta under medeltidens sista dekadens, och missade på det hela taget sitt syfte. Men det finns en sak som är oändligt mer absurt och opraktiskt än att bränna en människa på grund av hennes filosofi. Och det är vanan att säga att filosofi inte spelar någon roll, och detta görs överallt i det tjugonde århundradet, under den stora revolutionsålderns sista dekadens.

Övergripande teorier avvisas överallt; doktrinen om mänskliga rättigheter skickas bort tillsammans med doktrinen om syndafallet. Ateismen själv är alltför teologisk för oss idag. Revolutionen själv är alltför mycket av ett system, friheten själv alltför mycket av begränsning. Vi vill inte ha några generaliseringar. Bernard Shaw har uttryckt detta synsätt i ett perfekt epigram: “Den gyllene regeln är att det inte finns några gyllene regler.” Vi diskuterar mer och mer detaljer i konst, politik, litteratur. En människas åsikt om spårvagnar betyder någonting; hennes åsikt om Botticelli betyder någonting; hennes åsikt om alltet betyder ingenting. Hon må vända sej till och utforska en miljon föremål, men får inte finna det underliga föremålet universum - för gör hon det får hon en religion och går förlorad. Allting betyder någonting - förutom alltet.

Det behövs knappast några exempel på detta totala lättsinne ifråga om kosmisk filosofi. Det behövs knappast några exempel för att visa på att vad vi än annars tror påverkar våra praktiska affärer, tror vi inte att det spelar någon roll huruvida en människa är pessimist eller optimist, en kartesian eller hegelian, en materialist eller en spiritualist. Men låt mej ge ett exempel, taget på måfå. Vid vilket oskyldigt tebord som helst kan vi lätt få höra en person säga: “Livet är inte värt att leva.” Vi tar det som påståendet att det är en vacker dag; ingen tror att det rimligen kan ha någon allvarlig effekt på människan eller världen. Och ändå – om man verkligen trodde på det yttrandet, skulle världen stå på huvudet. Mördare skulle få medaljer för att ha räddat människor från livet; brandmän skulle straffas för att de stängt ute människor från döden; gift skulle användas som mediciner; doktorer skulle kallas på när folk mådde bra; Kungliga Humanistiska Sällskapet skulle utrotas som en hög lönnmördare.

Ändå diskuterar vi aldrig huruvida konversationspessimisten stärker eller upplöser samhället – ty vi är övertygade om att teorier inte spelar någon roll. Men detta var knappast tanken hos dem som införde vår frihet. När de gamla liberalerna tog bort munkavlen från heresierna, var deras tanke att man skulle kunna göra religiösa och filosofiska upptäckter. Deras tanke var att kosmisk sanning var så viktig att var och en borde bära oberoende vittnesbörd om den. Den moderna tanken är att kosmisk sanning är så oviktig att det inte spelar någon roll vad någon säger. De förra släppte tanken fri liksom människor släpper lös en rashund; de senare släpper tanken fri liksom människor kastar en oätlig fisk tillbaka i vattnet.

Aldrig har det varit så liten diskussion om människans natur som nu när, för första gången, vem som helst får diskutera den. Den gamla restriktionen betydde att endast de ortodoxa hade tillåtelse att diskutera religion. Den moderna restriktionen betyder att ingen har tillåtelse att göra det. Takt och ton, den sista och värsta av mänskliga vidskepelser, har lyckats tysta oss där allting annat misslyckats.

För hundra år sedan ansågs det vittna om dålig smak att vara en övertygad ateist. Sedan kom bradlaughiterna, de sista religiösa, de sista som brydde sej om Gud, men de kunde inte ändra saken. Det anses fortfarande vittna om dålig smak att vara övertygad ateist. Deras ansträngningar har bara lett till att det nu anses vittna om lika dålig smak att vara övertygad kristen. Frigörelsen har bara inneburit att helgonet spärrats in i samma torn av tystnad som kättaren. Sedan talar vi om politiken och vädret och kallar det för religionsfrihet.

Men det finns icke desto mindre människor – och jag är en av dem – som anser att det mest praktiska och viktiga med en person är hennes syn på universum. Vi anser att en herrgårdsfru som skaffar en hyresgäst bör känna till dennes inkomst men ännu hellre dennes filosofi. Vi anser att en general som ska bekämpa en fiende bör känna till dennes antal, men ännu viktigare är att känna fiendens filosofi. Vi anser att frågan inte är huruvida vår teori om kosmos påverkar tingens tillstånd, men huruvida det på sikt alls finns något annat som påverkar dem.

Under 1400-talet korsförhörde och torterade man en person för att han predikade något slags omoralisk attityd. Under 1800-talet berömde och smickrade vi Oscar Wilde för att han predikade en sådan attityd, och sedan krossade vi hans hjärta genom straffarbete när han levde ut den. Det kan ifrågasättas vilken av de två metoderna som var grymmast – men det är ingen tvekan om vilken som var löjligast. Inkvisitionens tidsålder har inte det minsta av skammen att ha skapat ett samhälle som avgudar en man för att han predikar de saker som det straffade honom för att ha praktiserat.

Nu, i vår tid, filosofi eller religion, har vår teori om de yttersta tingen drivits ut, mer eller mindre samtidigt, från två områden som den brukade dominera. Allmänna ideal brukade dominera litteraturen. De har drivits ut av ropen på “konst för konstens skull.” Allmänna ideal brukade dominera politiken. De har drivits ut av ropen på “effektivitet”, som grovt kunde översättas “politik för politikens skull.” Ständigt har under de senaste 20 åren ordnings- eller frihetsidealen minskat i våra böcker, samtidigt som ambitionerna i fråga om vett och vältalighet minskat i våra parlament. Litteraturen har blivit mindre politisk och politiken mindre litterär. Allmänna teorier om relationen mellan saker har därigenom uteslutits från båda, och det är läge att fråga: “Vad har vi tjänat eller förlorat genom denna uteslutning. Är litteraturen bättre, är politiken bättre, för att den har portat moralisten och filosofen?

När allting hos ett folk går mot svaghet och ineffektivitet, börjar det tala om effektivitet. På samma sätt är det när en människas kropp blivit ett vrak, som hon för första gången börjar tala om hälsa. Livskraftiga organismer talar inte om sina processer, men om sina mål. Det kan inte finnas något bättre bevis för en människas fysiska effektivitet än att han talar glatt om en resa till världens ände. Och det kan inte finnas något bättre bevis på en nations praktiska effektivitet än att den ständigt talar om en resa till tidens ände, en resa till Domens dag och det Nya Jerusalem. Det kan inte finnas något starkare tecken på en väderbiten materiell hälsa än tendensen att löpa mot höga och vilda ideal; det är i barndomens första livsglädje som vi ropar efter månen.

Ingen av de starka människorna i de starka tidsåldrarna skulle ha förstått vad man menade med strävan efter effektivitet. Hildebrand skulle ha sagt att han inte strävade efter effektivitet, utan för den Katolska Kyrkan. Danton skulle ha sagt att han inte strävade efter effektivitet, utan för frihet, jämlikhet och broderskap. Även om sådana människors ideal helt enkelt vore idealet att sparka en annan utför trapporna, så tänkte de på målet likt män, inte på processen likt paralytiker. De sa inte: “Jag lyfter mitt högra ben effektfullt, som du ser med användning av triceps och biceps, alla i utmärkt skick.” Deras känsla var helt annorlunda. De var så fyllda av den underbara synen av mannen som ligger platt vid trappans fot, att resten i ren extas följde som en blixt.

I praktiken innebär vanan att generalisera och idealisera inte på något sätt världslig svaghet. De stora teoriernas tid var också de stora resultatens tid. I känslornas och de vackra ordens tid, vid slutet av 1700-talet, var människorna verkligen robusta och effektiva. Känslomänniskorna besegrade Napoleon. Cynikerna kunde inte fånga De Wet. För hundra år sedan sköttes våra affärer - på gott och ont - triumfatoriskt av retorikerna. Nu rörs våra saker ihop helt hopplöst av starka, tysta män.

Och just så som detta avvisande av stora ord och stora visioner har frambringat en ras av små människor i politiken, så har den frambringat en ras av små människor i konsten. Våra moderna politiker gör anspråk på Caesars och Övermänniskans kolossala rättigheter, hävdar att de är alltför praktiska för att vara rena och alltför patriotiska för att vara moraliska, men utgången av det hela är att en medelmåtta blir chef för finansministeriet. Våra nya konstnärliga filosofer gör anspråk på samma moraliska dispens, på friheten att välta himmel och jord överända med sin energi, men utgången av det hela är att en medelmåtta blir lagerkransad.

Jag säger inte att det inte finns starkare människor än dessa, men kan någon säga att det finns starkare människor än de gamla som styrdes av sin filosofi och sjönk in i sin religion? Huruvida slaveri är bättre än frihet kan diskuteras. Men att deras slaveri uppnådde mer än vår frihet kommer att bli svårt för vem som helst att förneka. Teorin om konstens amoralitet har etablerats i de strikt konstnärliga klasserna. De är fria att producera vad helst de känner för. De är fria att skriva en “Det förlorade paradiset” där satan ska besegra Gud. De är fria att skriva en “Gudomlig komedi” där himmelen ligger under helvetets golv. Och vad har de gjort? Har de i sin universalitet producerat något större eller vackrare än det som yttrats av den våldsamme gibbelinske katoliken eller av den rigide puritanske skolmästaren? Vi vet att de producerat endast några dussinverk. Milton slår dem inte bara i fromhet, han slår dem även i vanvördnad. I alla deras små poesiböcker kan du inte finna ett finare trots mot Gud än satans hos Milton. Inte heller kommer du att finna hedendomens storhet bättre återgiven än hos den glödande kristne som beskrev hur Faranata lyfte sitt huvud som i förakt för helvetet.

Och anledningen är uppenbar. Hädelse är en konstnärlig effekt, eftersom hädelse beror på en filosofisk övertygelse. Hädelsen är beroende av tron och försvinner med den. Om någon betvivlar detta, låt henne sätta sej ner och med allvar försöka tänka hädiska tankar om Tor. Jag tror att hennes familj kommer att finna henne ganska utmattad vid slutet av dagen.

Varken i politikens eller litteraturens värld har alltså förnekandet av generella teorier blivit någon succé. Det kan hända att det har funnits många mångalna och missledande ideal som från tid till tid slagit mänskligheten. Men förvisso har det inte funnits något ideal som i praktiken varit så mångalet och missledande som det praktiska som ideal. Ingenting har förlorat så många möjligheter (eng. opportunities) som opportunismen. En stående symbol för denna epok är mannen som teoretiskt sett är praktiskt sinnad och i praktiken mer opraktisk än någon teoretiker.

Ingenting i detta universum är så ovist som detta slags dyrkan av världslig visdom. En människa som ständigt tänker på huruvida den eller den rasen är stark, huruvida det eller det målet verkar lovande, det är den människa som aldrig kommer att tro på något länge nog för att leda det till framgång. Den opportunistiske politikern är som en människa som skulle sluta spela biljard för att han förlorat i biljard, och sluta spela golf för att han förlorat i golf. Det finns inget som är så svagt som denna enorma vikt fäst vid omedelbar seger. Inget misslyckas som framgången.

Och sedan jag upptäckt att opportunismen misslyckas, har jag letts till att se på saken mer i stort och som följd därav se att den måste misslyckas. Jag uppfattar det som mycket mer praktiskt att börja från början och diskutera teorier. Jag anser att de människor som dödade varandra p.g.a. Homoousion-läran var mycket mer förnuftiga än de människor som diskuterar utbildningslagstiftningen. För de kristna dogmatikerna försökte etablera en helighetens regim, och försökte först av allt definiera vad som verkligen var heligt. Men våra moderna utbildare försöker åstadkomma en religiös frihet utan att försöka slå fast vad som är religion eller vad som är frihet. Om de gamla prästerna tvingade på mänskligheten ett påstående, gjorde de sej åtminstone en del besvär med att formulera det klart och redigt. Det var först de moderna anglikanska och nonkonformistiska mobbarna som lyckades förfölja p.g.a. en doktrin som de inte ens formulerat.

Av dessa skäl, och av många andra, har jag en gång för alla kommit att tro på ett återvändande till grunderna. Detta är huvudidén bakom denna bok. Jag vill behandla mina mest framstående samtida, inte personligt eller rent litterärt, utan i relation till de verkliga läror de sprider. Jag sysslar inte med Mr Rudyard Kipling som en livfull konstnär eller kraftfull personlighet - jag sysslar med honom som kättare, d.v.s. en människa vars syn på saker och ting har svagheten att skilja sej från min. Jag sysslar inte med Mr Bernard Shaw som en av de briljantaste och ärligaste nu levande människorna - jag sysslar med honom som kättare, d.v.s. en människa vars filosofi är helt solid, helt sammanhängande och helt felaktig.

Jag återvänder till de doktrinära metoderna från 1200-talet, inspirerad av det allmänna hoppet om att få något gjort. Anta att en stor samling uppstår på gatan angående något, låt oss säga en gatlykta, som många inflytelserika personer vill stöta omkull. En gråklädd munk, som är medeltidens ande, närmar sej och börjar tala på akademikers vis: “låt oss först, mina bröder, begrunda Ljusets värde. Om Ljuset i sej själv är gott...”. På denna punkt slås han, i någon mening ursäktligt, ner. Alla människor springer mot gatlyktan, gatlyktan är nerslagen inom tio minuter, och folket går omkring och gratulerar varandra till sin omedeltida effektivitet. Men vad det lider visar sej saken inte vara så enkel. Några har rivit ner gatlyktan p.g.a. att de ville ha en bättre lykta, några för att de ville ha gammalt järn och några för att de ville ha mörker eftersom deras gärningar voro onda. Några ansåg en gatlykta otillräcklig, några ansåg den överflödig, några agerade för att de ville slå sönder hela samhällsmaskineriet och några för att de ville ha något att slå sönder. Och det blir strid i natten, men ingen vet vem han slår. Så, gradvis och oundvikigen, idag, i morgon eller nästa dag, återvänder en övertygelse att munken trots allt hade rätt, och att allt beror på vad filosofin säger om Ljuset. Den enda haken är att vad vi kunde ha diskuterat under gatlyktan, måste vi nu diskutera i mörkret.

Ur Heretics (1900)

Kapitel I: Inledning till försvar för allt möjligt annat

Den enda möjliga ursäkten för den här boken är att den är ett svar på en utmaning. Även en dålig skytt får sin värdighet om han accepterar en duell. När jag för en tid sedan publicerade en serie hastigt tillkomna men allvarligt menade essäer under titeln Kättare (eng. Heretics), sa åtskilliga kritiker vars intellekt jag varmt respekterar (jag kan särskilt nämna herr G. S. Street) att det var enkelt för mej att säga åt alla andra att fastslå sin teori om universum, men att jag nogsamt undvikit att stödja min egen teori med exempel. "Jag ska börja bekymra mej om min filosofi", sa herr Street, "när Chesterton har givit oss sin."

Det var kanske ett oförsiktigt förslag till någon, som endast är alltför villig att skriva böcker av minsta lilla anledning. Men trots att det är herr Street som inspirerat och så att säga skapat denna bok, behöver han ju när allt kommer omkring inte läsa den. Och om han läser den, kommer han att finna att jag på dessa sidor på ett personligt och osystematiskt sätt försökt fastslå den filosofi jag kommit att tro på, genom mentala bilder snarare än en serie slutledningar. Jag ska inte kalla den min filosofi, för jag skapade den inte. Gud och mänskligheten skapade den, och den skapade mej.

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?

To show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger book than this; it is necessary to follow one path of argument; and this is the path that I here propose to follow. I wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly named romance. For the very word “romance” has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome. Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute. Beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove. The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired. If a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing. But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. It is THIS achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages.

But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered England. For I am that man in a yacht. I discovered England. I do not see how this book can avoid being egotistical; and I do not quite see (to tell the truth) how it can avoid being dull. Dulness will, however, free me from the charge which I most lament; the charge of being flippant. Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused. I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes. It is as easy as lying; because it is lying. The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth. I find myself under the same intolerable bondage. I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it. It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn’t. One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths. And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke.

For if this book is a joke it is a joke against me. I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before. If there is an element of farce in what follows, the farce is at my own expense; for this book explains how I fancied I was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I was the last. It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious. No one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself; no reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him: I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne. I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.

It may be that somebody will be entertained by the account of this happy fiasco. It might amuse a friend or an enemy to read how I gradually learnt from the truth of some stray legend or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy, things that I might have learnt from my catechism—if I had ever learnt it. There may or may not be some entertainment in reading how I found at last in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish church. If any one is entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the phrases in an omnibus, the accidents of politics or the pains of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain conviction of Christian orthodoxy, he may possibly read this book. But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

I add one purely pedantic note which comes, as a note naturally should, at the beginning of the book. These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles’ Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics. They are not intended to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation of that creed. When the word “orthodoxy” is used here it means the Apostles’ Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed. I have been forced by mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed; I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern Christians, of where we ourselves got it. This is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography. But if any one wants my opinions about the actual nature of the authority, Mr. G. S. Street has only to throw me another challenge, and I will write him another book.

Kapitel II: Den besatte

Verkligt världsliga människor förstår inte ens världen. De litar helt och hållet på några få cyniska maximer, som inte ens är sanna. Jag minns att jag en gång promenerade med en framgångsrik förläggare, när han fällde en anmärkning som jag hade hört åtskilliga gånger förut. Man skulle kunna säga att den är ett motto för vår moderna tid. Men nu hade jag hört den en gång för mycket och jag insåg plötsligt att det inte låg någonting i den.

Förläggaren yttrade om någon: “Den mannen kommer att gå långt, han tror på sej själv.” Och jag minns att när jag höjde huvudet för att lyssna fångades min blick av en buss med skylten Hanwell. [Englands största sinnessjukhus, övers.anm.]

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I denna egendomliga situation är det nu för tiden uppenbarligen inte möjligt (om man önskar världens gillande) att, som våra fäder gjorde, börja med att ta synden som ett faktum. Detta faktum som för dem var (och för mej är) något självklart, är just det faktum som nu har blivit speciellt försvagat eller förnekats. Men även om våra moderna filosofer förnekar syndens existens tror jag inte att de ännu har förnekat dårhusets. Vi är alla fortfarande ense om att det finns en intellektets kollaps lika omisskännlig som ett rasande hus. Människorna förnekar helvetet (“Hell”), men ännu så länge inte “Hanwell”. Som utgångspunkt för vårt inledande resonemang kan vi mycket väl sätta det senare begreppet i stället för det första. Jag menar att liksom alla tankar och teorier en gång bedömdes efter huruvida de kunde få en människa att förlora sin själ, kan vi för vårt nuvarande syfte bedöma alla moderna tankar och teorier efter huruvida de kan få en människa att förlora sitt förstånd.

Det är visserligen sant att en del människor helt ytligt och tanklöst anser sinnessjukdomen som sådan tilldragande. Men vid ett ögonblicks eftertanke ska de finna att om en sjukdom är behaglig är den vanligen någon annans. En blind kan vara pittorsek, men det behövs två ögon för att se det pittoreska. Likaså kan endast den kloke njuta av den sinnessjukes vildaste poem. För den sinnessjuke är sinnessjukdomen helt och hållet prosaisk, eftersom den är helt och hållet verklig. En man som tror sej vara en kyckling är i sina egna ögon lika vanlig som en kyckling. En man som tror att han är en glasbit är i sina egna ögon lika intetsägande som en glasbit. Det är hans sinnes homogenitet som gör honom intetsägande - och som gör honom vansinnig. Det är endast för att vi kan se det ironiska i hans inbillning, som vi överhuvudtaget kan finna honom lustig. Det är endast för att han inte kan se det ironiska i sin inbillning, som han överhuvudtaget sätts på Hanwell.

Kort sagt, egendomligheter gör endast intryck på vanliga människor. Egendomligheter gör inte intryck på egendomliga människor. Det är därför vanliga människor för ett mycket händelserikare liv än egendomliga människor, som alltid klagar över livets tristess. Det är därför de nya romanerna dör så snabbt, medan de gamla sagorna lever för alltid. Den gamla sagan har en normal pojke som hjälte. Det är hans äventyr som är förbluffande och de förbluffar honom eftersom han är normal. Men i den moderna psykologiska romanen är hjälten abnorm, centrum ligger inte i centrum. Därför gör inte ens de vildaste äventyr det rätta intrycket på honom och boken blir monoton. Man kan skriva en historia om en hjälte bland drakar, men inte om en drake bland drakar. Sagan dryftar vad en klok gör i en förryckt värld. Våra dagars nyktra realistiska roman dryftar vad en mer eller mindre förryckt gör i en intetsägande värld.

Låt oss då börja med dårhuset, låt oss från detta onda och fantastiska världshus bege oss ut på vår intellektuella resa. Om vi nu ska se på det sunda förnuftets filosofi måste vår första åtgärd i saken bli att utplåna ett lika stort som vanligt misstag. Överallt möter oss den åsikten att fantasier, och då särskilt exotiska fantasier, är skadliga för människans sinnesjämvikt. Man talar vanligen om poeter som själsligen labila; i allmänhet finns obestämda associationer mellan att sätta en lagerkrans på håret och att sticka halmstrån i det. Men fakta och historien vederlägger i grund detta påstående. De flesta av de verkligt stora diktarna har inte bara haft sitt förstånd i behåll utan även varit synnerligen affärsmässiga. Om Shakespeare verkligen någon gång höll i hästarna, så var det endast för att han var den som bäst kunde göra det. Fantasi föder inte vansinne. Förnuft är just det som föder vansinne. Poeter blir inte vansinniga, men det blir schackspelare.. Matematiker blir sinnessjuka, kassörer likaså, men mycket sällan skapande konstnärer.

Som ni kommer att se, angriper jag på intet sätt logiken – jag säger bara att faran ligger i logik, inte i fantasi. Konstnärligt faderskap är lika hälsosamt som fysiskt faderskap. Märk även att när en diktare verkligen var sinnesförvirrad var det eftersom hans hjärna hade en svag, det vill säga rationell punkt. Poe t.ex. var verkligen morbid, inte för att han hade fantasi utan för att han var en utpräglad analytisk begåvning. Till och med schack var för poetiskt för honom, han ogillade schack emedan detta spel var fullt av drottningar, kungar och torn precis som ett poem. Han föredrog avgjort damspelets svarta brickor eftersom de mera liknade svarta punkterna i ett diagram. Det mest karaktäristiska fallet är kanske Cowper, den ende store engelske diktare som blivit sinnesrubbad, och han drevs med absolut säkerhet in i vansinnet av logik, av predestinationslärans frånstötande och främmande logik. Diktandet var inte sjukdomen utan läkemedlet, som delvis höll honom vid hälsa. När han befann sej bland floden Ouses vida vatten och vita liljor, kunde han stundtals glömma det röda och törstiga helvete som hans fruktansvärda nödvändighetslära ville dra honom till.

Överallt kan vi se att människor inte mister förståndet genom att drömma. Kritiker är mer onormala än poeter. Homeros är alldeles tillräckligt samlad och lugn – det är hans kritiker som sliter honom i stycken. Shakespeare är fullständigt sej själv – det är hans kritiker som har upptäckt att han var någon annan. Ehuru evangelisten Johannes såg många egendomliga vidunder i sin uppenbarelse, såg han aldrig några varelser så fruktansvärda som de som sedan kommenterat honom. Den enkla sanningen är denna: Diktandet är normalt eftersom det flyter fritt på ett oändligt hav, medan förnuftet försöker överfara det oändliga havet och på detta sätt göra det ändligt. Resultatet blir själslig utmattning liksom Holbeins fysiska utmattning. Att acceptera allting är motion, att försöka förstå allting är en ansträngning. Diktaren begär endast hänförelse och expansion, en värld i vilken han kan sträcka på sej. Diktaren önskar bara att få ha sitt huvud i himlen, förnuftsmänniskan försöker på in himlen i huvet. Och det är hans huvud som sprängs.

Det betyder inte så mycket, men det hör ändå till saken, att detta slående misstag allmänt understöds av ett slående felcitat. Vi har alla hört citatet: “Steget är kort mellan geni och vansinne.” Detta citat härrör från Dryden, som inte alls sa att steget var kort mellan geni och vansinne. Dryden visste bättre. Han var själv ett geni; det skulle ha varit svårt att hitta en mer romantisk och känslig människa än han. Vad Dryden sa var detta: “En skarp intelligens befinner sej inte långt från galenskap,” och det är sant. Det är endast ett skarpt intellekt som kan brytas. Man får också ta i beaktande vilken sorts människa Dryden talade om. Han talade inte om någon diktare eller mystiker. Han talade om en cynisk världsman, en skeptiker, en diplomat, en rationell politiker. Sådana män är sannerligen nära galenskap. Deras oupphörlig mätande av sin egen och andras hjärnor är en riskabel sysselsättning. Det är alltid farligt för förståndet att mäta förståndet.

Om logikmänniskor ofta är besatta är det lika sant att besatta vanligen är logikmänniskor. När jag en gång var inbegripen i en fejd med Clarion angående den fria viljan, sa den förträfflige skribenten R.B. Suthers att den fria viljan var vansinne eftersom den betydde handlingar utan orsak och en vansinnigs handlingar skulle då vara utan orsak. Jag ska här inte uppehålla mej vid den katastrofala luckan i den deterministiska logiken. Det är alldeles uppenbart att om någon handling, även en vansinnigs, kan vara utan orsak, så är determinismen orimlig. Om orsakskedjan kan brytas av för en sinnessjuk, så kan den brytas av för en vanlig människa. Men mitt syfte är att peka ut något mera praktiskt. Det kanske var naturligt att en modern marxist inte visste något om den fria viljan. Men det var onekligen anmärkningsvärt att en modern marxist inte visste något om dårar. Mr. Suthers visste tydligen ingenting om dårar.

Det sista man kan säga om en dåre är att hans handlingar är orsakslösa. Om över huvud taget några mänskliga handlingar kan kallas orsakslösa är det snarare en frisk människas oreflekterade handlingar; när hon visslar under en promenad, slår ned gräset med sin käpp, gnuggar händerna o.s.v. Det är den lyckliga människan som gör onyttiga saker; den sjuka är inte nog stark att för att vara lättjefylld. Det är just sådana bekymmerslösa och orsakslösa handlingar som en sinnessjuk aldrig kan förstå, ty den sinnessjuka finner vanligen (liksom deterministen) alltför mycket orsak till allting. Den sinnessjuka skulle dikta in en hemlig mening i dessa meningslösa förehavanden. Hon skulle betrakta nermejandet av gräset som angrepp på annans egendom. Hon skulle betrakta visslingen som en signal till en medbrottsling. Om den sinnessjuka för ett ögonblick kunde vara vårdslös och bekymmerslös skulle hon återfå sitt förstånd.

Var och en som haft den obehagliga upplevelsen att samtala med en människa, som är helt eller delvis sinnessjuk, vet att dennas mest karaktäristiska egenskap är ett fruktansvärt klart sinne för detaljer; hon förbinder saker med varandra till ett mönster mer invecklat än en labyrint. Om du diskuterar med en sinnessjuk är det mycket troligt att du drar det kortaste strået, för i många avseenden är hennes intellekt betydligt rörligare, eftersom det inte hindras av något sunt omdöme. Hon hålls inte tillbaka av något sinne för humor eller av medlidande eller av erfarenhetens stumma visshet. Hon är den mest logiska eftersom hon saknar vissa normala känsloreaktioner. Egentligen är därför den vanliga termen för sinnessjukdom missledande. Den sinnessjuka är inte en människa som förlorat förståndet; hon är en människa som förlorat allt utom förståndet.

Den sinnessjukas förklaring till en företeelse är alltid fullständig, och ofta helt tillfredsställande logiskt sett. Eller, för att uttrycka sej mer koncist är den vansinniga förklaringen, om inte slutgiltig, så åtminstone omöjlig att säga emot, vilket man kan iaktta speciellt i de två eller tre vanligaste varianterna av sinnessjukdom. Om en människa t.ex. säger, att alla människor sammansvurit sej mot henne, kan man inte prestera något annat motargument än att alla människor förnekar sammansvärjningen, vilket är just vad de skulle göra om de vore sammansvurna. Hennes bevisning är lika bindande som er. Om någon påstår att han är den som rätteligen borde vara Englands kung, är det ett ofullständigt motargument att de makthavande anser honom vansinnig, för om han vore kung av England skulle det kanske vara det klokaste de makthavande kunde göra. Anta att en man påstår sej vara Jesus Kristus. Är det då ett svar att säga att människorna förnekar att han är Frälsaren? Världen förnekade att Kristus var Frälsaren.

Icke desto mindre har han fel. Men om vi försöker att exakt definiera felaktigheten i hans resonemang, kommer vi att finna det något svårare än vi väntat. Kanske är den riktigaste förklaring vi kan ge att hans tankar rör sej i en perfekt men trång cirkel. En liten cirkel är lika oändlig som en stor cirkel, men trots att den är oändlig är den inte lika stor. På samma sätt är den sinnessjukas förklaring lika fullständig som den klokas, men den är inte lika omfattande. En kula är lika rund som jorden, men den är inte jorden. Det finns något sådant som ett trångt universum, och det finns något sådant som en liten och förkrympt evighet. Det kan man konstatera i många moderna religioner.

Om man nu ser saken helt utifrån och empiriskt kan man säga att det starkaste och mest omisskännliga tecknet på vansinne är denna kombination av logisk fullständighet och själslig inskränkthet. Den vansinnigas teori förklarar i stort sett allt, men hon kan inte se i stort. Vad jag menar är att om ni eller jag finge att göra med en människa vars sinne håller på att insjukna borde vi framför allt försöka, inte så mycket ge henne argument, men fastmer att ge henne luft, att övertyga henne om att det finns något renare och svalare utanför ett enda arguments kvävande famntag.

Låt oss nu anta att det gällde det första fall jag tagit som typiskt, den människa som trodde att alla sammansvurit sej mot henne. Hur skulle vi bäst kunna vädja till henne och protestera mot hennes tvångsföreställning? Jag tror att vi skulle säga ungefär så här: “Ja, jag medger att din anklagelse inte är grundlös, och att det är åtskilligt som pekar i den riktning som du antyder. Jag medger att din förklaring förklarar mycket, men tänk så mycket som den inte förklarar. Finns det inga andra levnadsöden i världen än ditt, är alla människor intresserade av just ditt öde? Anta att vi går med på detaljerna; kanske det bara var förslagenhet när den där mannen på gatan inte tycktes se dej; kanske det enda skälet till att polisen frågade efter ditt namn var att han redan visste det. Men hur mycket lyckligare skulle du inte vara om du bara hade klart för dej att dessa människor inte brydde sej det minsta om dej! Hur mycket större skulle inte ditt liv bli, om ditt jag kunde bli mindre, om du bara kunde betrakta andra människor med vanlig nyfikenhet och förnöjelse, om du kunde se dem vandra fram i sin soliga själviskhet och sin virila likgiltighet! Då skulle du bli intresserad av dem eftersom de inte är intresserade av dej. Då skulle du bryta dej ut från den lilla eländiga teater där ditt eget skådespel spelas om och om igen och du skulle finna att du var under en friare himmel på en gata full av underbara främlingar.”

Eller anta att vi hade att göra med det andra fallet av vansinne, där den sjuke gjorde anspråk på kronan. Då skulle er impuls vara att säga: “Javisst, du kanske vet att du är kung av England, men vad bryr du dej om det? Gör en enda kraftansträngning och du kommer att bli en människa och kunna se ner på alla jordens kungar.” Eller det kanske gällde det tredje fallet, där den sjuke påstod sej vara Kristus. Om vi då gåve uttryck åt vad vi kände, skulle vi säga: “Du är alltså världens Skapare och Frälsare – vilken liten värld det måste vara! Vilken liten himmel du måtte bebo med änglar mindre än fjärilar! Så nedslående de måste vara att vara Gud, och en ofullkomlig Gud! Finns det verkligen inget liv som är fullkomligare och ingen kärlek mer underbar än din? Och är det verkligen till din lilla och ömkansvärda gestalt, som allt skapat måste sätta sin tro? Hur mycket lyckligare skulle du inte vara, hur mycket större skulle du inte vara, om en högre Guds hammare kunde krossa ditt lilla kosmos, skingrande stjärnorna som julgransglitter, och lämna dej under den fria rymden med samma rätt som andra människor att blicka uppåt likaväl som nedåt!”

Vi måste komma ihåg att den mest praktiska vetenskapen just anlägger denna synpunkt på själslig sjukdom. Den försöker inte resonera bort den, som om den vore kätteri, utan bryta den som en förtrollning. Varken den moderna vetenskapen
eller den antika religionen tror på den fullständigt fria tanken. Teologin bannlyser vissa tankar genom att kalla dem hädiska. Vetenskapen bannlyser vissa tankar genom att kalla dem morbida. Vissa religiösa samfund försöker i större eller mindre utsträckning att få människor att låta bli att tänka på könet. Det nya vetenskapliga samfundet försöker avgjort att få människor att låta bli att tänka på döden. Den är en realitet, men den anses vara en morbid realitet. Och när den har att göra med sådana vilkas morbiditet har en anstrykning av mani, ja, då bryr sej den moderna vetenskapen mycket mindre om logik än en dansande dervisch. I sådana fall räcker det inte att den olyckliga människan kräver sanning, hon måste kräva hälsa. Ingenting annat kan frälsa henne än ett blint begär att bli normal. En människa kan inte tänka sej ur sin sinnessjukdom, ty det är just tankarnas organ som har blivit sjukt, omöjligt att styra och så att säga osjälvständigt. Hon kan endast frälsas genom vilja eller tro. Så snart tankarna rör sej, rör de sej bara i sin vanliga kretsgång. Hon kommer att färdas runt, runt sin logiska cirkel, precis som en man i en vagn på ringlinjen kommer att färdas runt, runt längs ringlinjen försåvitt han inte fattar det frivilliga, kraftfulla och mystiska beslutet att stiga av vid en viss hållplats. Det hela hänger på beslutet, en dörr måste stängas för alltid. Varje botemedel är ett desperat botemedel, varje kur en mirakelkur. Att bota en vansinnig är inte att disputera med en filosof, det är att driva ut djävulen. Och hur stillsamt läkare och psykiatriker än skrider till verket i denna sak är deras inställning utpräglat intolerant – lika intolerant som Blodiga Marias. Deras inställning är i själva verket att människan måste sluta tänka, om hon ska fortsätta att leva. Deras ordination är intellektuell amputering. Om ditt huvud är dej till förargelse, hugg av det; för det är bättre, inte bara att komma in i Himmelriket som ett barn utan att komma in som en imbecill hellre än att med hela sin tankeförmåga i behåll kastas i helvetet – eller sättas på Hanwell.

Sådan visar erfarenheten att den sinnessjuka är: hon resonerar ofta logiskt, för det mesta med framgång. Utan tvivel skulle man kunna besegra henne med motargument och bevisningen mot henne föras rent logiskt. Men hennes fall kan definieras mycket mer exakt, om man använder allmännare och till och med estetiska begrepp. En sinnessjuk människa befinner sej i en skarpt avgränsad och upplyst cell: hennes fixa idé. Hon är slipad till en spets som sargar henne själv. Hon är utan den tveksamhet och sammansatthet som betyder hälsa.

Som jag klarlade i inledningen har jag beslutat att i dessa första kapitel lägga fram inte så mycket ett doktrindiagram som fastmer några aspekter på en åsikt. Varför jag så omständligt beskrivit min syn på sinnessjukdom är av ett särskilt skäl, ty sinnessjuka gör samma intryck på mej som de flesta moderna filosofer. Den omisskännliga stämning, som hör Hanwell till är också förhärskande vid minst hälften av alla vetenskapliga institutioner och lärdomsstolar och de flesta psykiatriker är också på sitt sätt psykopater. Hos dem alla finner vi den kombination vi redan lagt märke till: kombinationen av ett expansivt och uttömmande logiskt resonemang med ett förkrympt sunt förnuft. De är endast universella i det avseendet att de först tar en otillfredsställande förklaring och sedan med den förklarar allting annat. Men något småprickigt får inte större prickar om det breder ut sej i all oändlighet. Dessa människor ser ett schackbräde som vitt på svart och även om universum är stenlagt med detta mönster är det fortfarande vitt på svart. Liksom den sinnessjuka kan de inte tänka sej mer än en utgångspunkt, de kan inte göra en andlig kraftansträngning och med ens se det som svart på vitt.

Vi kan börja med det mest uppenbara fallet, materialismen. Dess förklaring av världen har en slags förryckt enkelhet. Den har just den egenskap som kännetecknar en sinnessjuks argument; vi har på en gång en känsla av att den täcker allt och en känsla av att den utelämnar allt. Betrakta noggrant en sådan förträfflig och grundlig materialist som t.ex. McCabe och ni kommer i utomordentligt hög grad att erfara denna säregna känsla. Han förstår allting och ingenting tycks vara värt att förstå. Hans kosmos kanske är fullständig ned till minsta nit och kugghjul, men ändå är hans kosmos mindre än vår värld. I sin förklaring, liksom de sinnessjukas, tycks han vara omedveten om att det finns oförklarliga krafter och att vår jord är så likgiltig; den befattar sej inte med väsentligheter som kämpande människor eller modersstolthet, den första kärleken eller dödsångesten. Jorden är så stor och kosmos så litet. Kosmos är, kan man säga, det minsta hål som en människa kan gömma huvudet i.

Man måste förstå att jag inte nu diskuterar dessa åsikters förhållande till sanningen, utan för närvarande enbart deras förhållande till hälsan. När jag hunnit längre i argumenteringen hoppas jag kunna ge mej in på problemets sanningsenlighet, objektivt sett, men än så länge talar jag bara om den psykologiska sidan av saken. Jag tänker inte nu bevisa för Haeckel att materialismen inte är sann, lika litet som jag försökte bevisa för den man som trodde sej vara Kristus att han led av en inbillning. Jag vill här bara påpeka det faktum att båda fallen äger samma slags fullständighet och samma slags ofullständighet. Man kan förklara att en likgiltig allmänhet spärrat in en man på Hanwell genom att säga att det är korsfästandet av en gud, som världen inte är värdig. Denna förklaring är en förklaring. Likadant kan man förklara världens gång med att allting, till och med människornas själar, är blad som obevekligt växer fram på ett suveränt omedvetet träd – en materiens blinda förutbestämdhet. Förklaringen är även här en förklaring fast den naturligtvis inte är så fullständig som den sinnessjukas. Men det väsentliga i detta fall är att en normal människas sinne inte bara måste invända mot båda utan även att det har samma invändningar mot båda. Dess ungefärliga uppfattning är nog att om mannen på Hanwell är den enda rätta Guden, är han inte någon särdeles fullkomlig gud. Och likadant: om materialistens kosmos är det enda rätta kosmos är det inte något särdeles fullkomligt kosmos. Det har kyrmpt och gudomligheten är mindre gudomlig än åtskilliga människor och (enligt Haeckel) är livet i sin helhet mera inskränkt, grått och trivialt än olika sidor av det sedda var för sej. Delarna tycks större än det hela.

Vi måste komma ihåg att den materialistiska filosofin (sann eller ej) utan tvekan har en vida mer begränsande effekt än någon religion. På sätt och vis är givetvis alla intelligenta idéer trånga. De kan inte vara bredare än sej själva. En kristen har endast begränsningar på samma sätt som en ateist. Han kan inte anse kristendomen falsk och fortsätta att vara kristen och ateisten kan inte anse ateismen falsk och fortsätta att vara ateist. Men nu råkar det faktiskt vara så att materialismen i ett speciellt avseende är mera begränsad än spiritualismen. Mr McCabe anser mej vara en slav därför att jag inte får tro på determinismen. Jag anser Mr McCabe vara en slav därför att han inte får tro på älvor. Om vi närmare granskar dessa två förbud ska vi finna att hans är betydligt mer restriktivt än mitt. Den kristna människan har full frihet att tro att det finns en viss grad av bestämd ordning och oundviklig utveckling i universum. Men materialisten får inte låta ett enda korn av spiritualism eller mirakel komma in i sin ofelbara maskin. Stackars Mr McCabe får inte behålla ens den allra minsta lilla älva, även om den är så liten att den kan gömmas i en blåklocka. Den kristen medger att universum är mångsidigt och till och med brokigt precis som en normal människa vet att hon är sammansatt. Den normala människan vet att hon i sej har en bit djur, en bit djävul, en bit helgon och en bit medborgare. Ja, en verkligt normal människa vet att hon har en anstrykning av abnormitet. Men materialismens värld är fullständigt enkel och solid, precis som den vansinnige är fullständigt säker på att han är klok. Materialisten är säker på att historien helt enkelt varit en orsakskedja, precis som den intressante person vi tidigare nämnt är fullständigt säker på att han helt enkelt är en kyckling. Materialister och vansinniga är aldrig tveksamma.

Andliga doktriner begränsar inte människan i så hög grad som materialistiska förnekanden. Även om jag tror på odödlighet behöver jag inte tänka på den, men om jag inte tror på odödlighet får jag inte tänka på den. I första fallet är vägen öppen och jag kan gå hur långt jag vill, men i det andra fallet är vägen stängd. Men vi kan ställa saken på sin spets och likheten med vansinne blir allt mer slående. Ty vår invändning mot dårens uttömmande och logiska teori var den, att antingen den var riktig eller ej förstörde den gradvis hans mänsklighet. Nu är också anklagelsen mot materialistens huvudsakliga slutsatser, riktiga eller ej, att de gradvis förstör hans mänsklighet, och därmed menar jag inte bara vänlighet utan hoppfullhet, mod, fantasi, initiativ, allt som är mänskligt. När nu materialismen t.ex. kan leda en människa till fullständig fatalism (vilket den vanligen gör) är det fullkomligt lönlöst att påstå att detta på något sätt kan vara en befrielse. Det är orimligt att påstå att man särskilt befrämjar frihet, när man bara använder den fria tanken till att förstöra den fria viljan. Deterministerna binder människan, lösgör henne inte. De kallar sin lag orsakskedjan. Det är den värsta kedja som någonsin fjättrat en mänsklig varelse. Man kan om man vill använda frihetens terminologi på den materialistiska läran, men det är alldeles uppenbart att det är lika orimligt att använda denna terminologi som att anavända den på en människa som sitter på dårhus. Man kan om man vill säga att en människa har sin fulla frihet att anse sej vara ett förlorat ägg. Men det är väl ändå ett mera orubbligt och viktigt faktum att om hon är ett förlorat ägg har hon inte sin fulla frihet att äta, dricka, sova, promenera eller röka en cigarett. Likadant kan man om man vill säga, att den djärve, spekulative deterministen har sin frihet att förneka existensen av viljan. Men det är ett långt mer betydelsefullt faktum att han inte har sin frihet att lovorda, att förbanna, att tacka, att rättfärdiga, att påverka, att straffa, att motstå frestelser, att reta upp pöbeln, att göra nyårslöften, att förlåta syndare, att resa sej mot förtryckare eller ens att säga “tack så mycket” när någon räcker honom senapen.

Innan jag lämnar detta ämne vill jag framhålla att man tycks benägen att tro att den materialistiska fatalismen på något sätt är gynnsamt inställd till nåd, till utplånandet av grymma straff, ja, av straff över huvud taget. Detta är att låta sanningen göra helomvändning. Man skulle däremot lätt kunna tänka sej att nödvändighetsläran varken gör till eller från, att den låter mannen med piskan fortsätta att slå och att den inte förändrar den godhjärtade vännen. Att synderna är oundvikliga utesluter inte straff, om det utesluter något är det möjlighet till bättring. Det är lika troligt att determinismen leder till grymhet som det är säkert att den leder till feghet. Determinismen står inte i något motsatsförhållande till en grym behandling av brottslingar. Vad den (kanske) står i motsättning till är en tolerant behandling av brottslingar, till något försök att räcka dem en hjälpande hand i deras moraliska kamp. Deterministen tror inte på att vädja till viljan, men han tror på att flytta syndaren till en annan omgivning. Han får inte säga till syndaren: “gå i frid och synda inte mer”, ty denne kan inte hjälpa det. Men han kan koka honom i olja, ty kokande olja är en omgivning. När vi därför nu ser på materialistens gestalt har den samma fantastiska konturer som den vansinniges: båda intar en ohållbar och outhärdlig position.

Naturligtvis gäller allt detta inte bara om materialisten. Detsamma gäller den andra ytterligheten inom den spekulativa filosofin. Det finns en sorts skeptiker som är vida mer fruktansvärda än den som tror att allting har sin upprinnelse i materia. Man kan stöta på en skeptiker som tror att allting har sin upprinnelse i honom själv. Han betvivlar inte existensen av änglar och djävlar utan existensen av människor och kor. I hans ögon är hans vänner en myt uppfunnen av honom själv. Han har skapat sin egen fader och moder. Denna kusliga fantasi har i sej något avgjort tilldragande för våra dagars mystiskt anstrukna egoism. Förläggaren som trodde att en människa kunde gå långt “för att han trodde på sej själv”, de som söker Övermänniskan och alltid söker henne i spegeln, de författar som talar om att skapa intryck genom sin personlighet i stället för att skapa liv till glädje för andra människor – alla dessa människor har i realiteten endast en tum mellan sej och denna förfärliga ekande tomhet. När sedan den vänliga världen omkring en sådan människa har utplånats, eftersom den är en lögn, när hennes vänner bleknar till skuggor och världens grundvalar rämnar; när sedan den människa som tror på inget och ingen är ensam i sin egen mardröm, då kan det storslagna individualistiska mottot passas in på henne som en ironisk hämnd. Stjärnorna är endast lysande punkter i hans hjärnas mörker, hans moders ansikte är endast en skiss på cellväggen gjord med hans vanvetts penna. Men över dörren står skrivet den skrämmande sanningen: “Han tror på sej själv.”

Huvudsaken här är emellertid att lägga märke till att denna panegoistiska ytterlighet inom filosofin uppvisar samma paradox som den motsatta ytterligheten, materialism. Den är lika fullständig i teorin och lika bristfällig i praktiken. För enkelhetens skull kan vi klargöra saken för oss genom att säga att en människa kan leva i tron att hon alltid drömmer. Men det är uppenbart att man inte kan ge henne något positivt bevis för att hon inte drömmer, av den enkla orsaken att man inte kan bevisa något som inte också kan bevisas i en dröm. Men om en man sätter eld på London och sedan säger att hans hushållerska snart kommer att väcka honom med morgontéet skulle vi spärra in honom tillsammans med en del andra logikmänniskor på ett ställe vi ofta alluderat på i detta kapitel.

En människa som inte tror på sina sinnen och en människa som inte tror på något annat än sina sinnen är båda sinnessjuka, men denna galenskap kan inte bevisas genom någon felaktighet i deras resonemang utan genom att hela deras liv är felaktigt. De har båda låst in sej i var sin kista, med sol och stjärnor målade på insidan; de är båda oförmögna att ta sej ut, den ena till hälsa och lycka i himlen, den andra till hälsa och lycka på jorden. Deras resonemang är fullständigt förnuftigt, ja, på sätt och vis oändligt förnuftigt precis som en slant är oändlig rund. Men det finns något sådant som en ynklig oändlighet, en lumpen och förträlad evighet. Jag har gjort den roande iakttagelsen att många moderna filosofer, antingen de är skeptiker eller mystiker, har tagit som sitt tecken en viss österländsk symbol,
som är själva symbolen för denna slutgiltiga intighet. När de vill avbilda evigheten avbildar de den som en orm som biter sej själv i stjärten. Det ligger en lite förbluffande sarkasm i avbildningen av denna mycket otillfredsställande måltid. Evigheten hos de materialistiska fatalisterna, de österländska pessimisterna, de högmodiga teosoferna och vetenskapsmännen av idag kan med fog representeras av en orm, som biter sej själv i stjärten ett degenererat självförstörande djur.

Detta kapitel är rent praktiskt och rör sej om vad som verkligen är vansinnets huvudsakliga kännetecken; vi kan som sammandrag säga att det är förnuft utan rot, förnuft i ett tomrum. Den människa som börjar tänka utan att ha de riktiga grundläggande principerna mister förståndet, så gör även den människa som börjar tänka i fel ände. På de följande sidorna ska vi försöka upptäcka vilket som är den rätta änden. Som följd härav kan vi fråga oss: om detta är vad som kommer människor att förlora förståndet – vad är det då som gör att de inte förlorar det? I slutet av denna bok hoppas jag att kunna giva ett bestämt (några kommer att tycka ett alltför bestämt) svar. Men redan nu är det möjligt för oss att på samma rent praktiska sätt ge ett allmänt svar, som rör just detta problem: hur har människor genom tiderna kunnat behålla förståndet. Så länge man har mysticismer är man frisk, när man tar bort mysticism skapar man morbiditet. En vanlig människa har alltid varit normal eftersom en vanlig människa alltid varit mystiker. Hon har behållit skymningen. Hon har alltid haft en fot på jorden och en i Sagolandet. Hon har alltid givit sej själv tillåtelse att tvivla på sina gudar, men har också alltid (i olikhet med dagens agnostiker) tillåtit sej själv att tro på dem. Hon har brytt sej mer om sanning än om logik. Om en normal människa skulle upptäcka två varandra motsägande sanningar skulle hon acceptera båda och motsägelsen på köpet. Hennes andliga seende är liksom hennes fysiska stereoskopiskt; hon ser två bilder på en gång och ser ändå – eller just därför – bättre. Sålunda har hon alltid trott på ödet, men också på den fria viljan. Sålunda har hon också trott på att barnen hör himmelriket till, men även att de ska lyda det jordiska riket. Hon har beundrat de unga för att de är unga och de gamla för att de inte är det.

Det är just denna balansakt mellan skenbara motsägelser som alltid varit grunden för en frisk människas andliga spänst. Den morbida logiken strävar efter att göra allting tydligt och lyckas med att göra allting mystiskt, men mysticismen tillåter en sak att vara mystisk, varpå allt annat blir tydligt. Deterministen gör en sak fullständigt klar, nämligen kasualteorin, och upptäcker sedan att han inte kan säga “om du skulle vilja vara så vänlig” till pigan. Den kristne tilåter den fria viljan att förbli ett heligt mysterium, men just av det skälet får hans förhållande till pigan en gnistrande, genomskinlig klarhet. Han sår dogmats frö i mörker, men när trädet vuxit upp sträcker sej dess grenar mot ljuset med sprudlande naturlig friskhet.

Liksom vi tagit cirkel till symbol för logik och galenskap kan vi med all rätt ta korset som symbol för både mysterium och hälsa. Buddismen är centripetal, kristendomen centrifugal. Den bryter sej utåt. Cirkeln är perfekt och oändlig till sin natur, men dess storlek är orubbligt fixerad. Den kan aldrig bli mindre eller större. Men korset, trots att det i sitt hjärta har en sammanstötning och en motsägelse, kan sträcka ut sina fyra armar i oändlighet utan att någonsin ändra skepnad. Det kan växa utan att förändras eftersom det i sitt centrum har en paradox. Cirkeln är bunden – den återvänder ständigt till sej själv. Korset öppnar sina armar för himlens fyra vindar, en vägvisare för alla fria vandrare.

Symboler har ett visst, om än dimmigt, värde när man avhandlar dessa djupa spörsmål. En symbol tagen från naturen klargör med tillräcklig tydlighet mysticismens betydelse för människosläktet. Det enda skapade som vi inte kan betrakta, är just det vars ljus belyser atllt vi ser. Med samma kraft som solen vid middagstiden belyser mysticismen allt i det bländande skenet av sin egen segerrika osynlighet. Den rena intellektualismen är bara månsken; den är ljus utan värme, sekundärt ljus reflekterat från en död värld. Men grekerna hade rätt när de gjorde Apollon både till fantasins och sundhetens gud, ty han var både diktens och läkekonstens skyddspatron. Om de nödvändiga dogmerna och den speciella tron ska jag tala längre fram. Men den transcedentalism efter vilken alla människor lever har mycket av den ställning solen intar på himlen. Vi är medvetna om den som något strålande och förvirrande, på en gång en bländande flamma och en obestämd fläck. Men månens cirkel är klar och omöjlig att ta miste på, den återvänder alltid och oundvikligt som Euklides cirkel på svarta tavlan. Ty månen är en kallt förnuftig företeelse – och månen är alla dårars moder.

Kapitel III: Tankens självmord

The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition. Phrases like “put out” or “off colour” might have been coined by Mr. Henry James in an agony of verbal precision. And there is no more subtle truth than that of the everyday phrase about a man having “his heart in the right place.” It involves the idea of normal proportion; not only does a certain function exist, but it is rightly related to other functions. Indeed, the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and perverse tenderness of the most representative moderns. If, for instance, I had to describe with fairness the character of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I could not express myself more exactly than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous heart; but not a heart in the right place. And this is so of the typical society of our time.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the enemy of the human race—because he is so human. As the other extreme, we may take the acrid realist, who has deliberately killed in himself all human pleasure in happy tales or in the healing of the heart. Torquemada tortured people physically for the sake of moral truth. Zola tortured people morally for the sake of physical truth. But in Torquemada’s time there was at least a system that could to some extent make righteousness and peace kiss each other. Now they do not even bow. But a much stronger case than these two of truth and pity can be found in the remarkable case of the dislocation of humility.

It is only with one aspect of humility that we are here concerned. Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small. Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility. Giants that tread down forests like grass are the creations of humility. Towers that vanish upwards above the loneliest star are the creations of humility. For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we. All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble. It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything—even pride.

But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance. It is exactly this intellectual helplessness which is our second problem.

The last chapter has been concerned only with a fact of observation: that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from his reason than his imagination. It was not meant to attack the authority of reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it. For it needs defence. The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels.

The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle. They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical in the playful assertion that a door is not a door. The modern latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young sceptic says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.”

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H. G. Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called “Doubts of the Instrument.” In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all—the authority of a man to think. We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

Lest this should be called loose assertion, it is perhaps desirable, though dull, to run rapidly through the chief modern fashions of thought which have this effect of stopping thought itself. Materialism and the view of everything as a personal illusion have some such effect; for if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think about. But in these cases the effect is indirect and doubtful. In some cases it is direct and clear; notably in the case of what is generally called evolution.

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, “I think; therefore I am.” The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, “I am not; therefore I cannot think.”
Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr. H. G. Wells when he insists that every separate thing is “unique,” and there are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive. Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), “All chairs are quite different,” he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them “all chairs.”

Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test. We often hear it said, for instance, “What is right in one age is wrong in another.” This is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. If women, say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and at another time by growing thinner. But you cannot say that they are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong. If the standard changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard? Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.

It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress. It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote—
“Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves
of change.“He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is. Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into.
The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about the past or future simply impossible. The theory of a complete change of standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure of honouring our fathers; it deprives us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.

This bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our time would not be complete without some reference to pragmatism; for though I have here used and should everywhere defend the pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth, there is an extreme application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever. My meaning can be put shortly thus. I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth. The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute. But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute. This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks. The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be a human being) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice. The pragmatist, who professes to be specially human, makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact.

To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania. The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it. This is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts of the advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought. What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course. It has run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world. It might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretence that modern England is Christian. But it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow. Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority than because they are a new one. Free thought has exhausted its own freedom. It is weary of its own success. If any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set. If any frightened curate still says that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread, we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc, “Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night: it is already morning.” We have no more questions left to ask. We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers.

But one more word must be added. At the beginning of this preliminary negative sketch I said that our mental ruin has been wrought by wild reason, not by wild imagination. A man does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out in square inches. Now, one school of thinkers has seen this and jumped at it as a way of renewing the pagan health of the world. They see that reason destroys; but Will, they say, creates. The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not in reason. The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it. I have no space to trace or expound this philosophy of Will. It came, I suppose, through Nietzsche, who preached something that is called egoism. That, indeed, was simpleminded enough; for Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it. To preach anything is to give it away. First, the egoist calls life a war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible trouble to drill his enemies in war. To preach egoism is to practise altruism. But however it began, the view is common enough in current literature. The main defence of these thinkers is that they are not thinkers; they are makers. They say that choice is itself the divine thing. Thus Mr. Bernard Shaw has attacked the old idea that men’s acts are to be judged by the standard of the desire of happiness. He says that a man does not act for his happiness, but from his will. He does not say, “Jam will make me happy,” but “I want jam.” And in all this others follow him with yet greater enthusiasm. Mr. John Davidson, a remarkable poet, is so passionately excited about it that he is obliged to write prose. He publishes a short play with several long prefaces. This is natural enough in Mr. Shaw, for all his plays are prefaces: Mr. Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry. But that Mr. Davidson (who can write excellent poetry) should write instead laborious metaphysics in defence of this doctrine of will, does show that the doctrine of will has taken hold of men. Even Mr. H. G. Wells has half spoken in its language; saying that one should test acts not like a thinker, but like an artist, saying, “I FEEL this curve is right,” or “that line SHALL go thus.” They are all excited; and well they may be. For by this doctrine of the divine authority of will, they think they can break out of the doomed fortress of rationalism. They think they can escape.

But they cannot escape. This pure praise of volition ends in the same break up and blank as the mere pursuit of logic. Exactly as complete free thought involves the doubting of thought itself, so the acceptation of mere “willing” really paralyzes the will. Mr. Bernard Shaw has not perceived the real difference between the old utilitarian test of pleasure (clumsy, of course, and easily misstated) and that which he propounds. The real difference between the test of happiness and the test of will is simply that the test of happiness is a test and the other isn’t. You can discuss whether a man’s act in jumping over a cliff was directed towards happiness; you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will. Of course it was. You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul. But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action. By this praise of will you cannot really choose one course as better than another. And yet choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising.

The worship of will is the negation of will. To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose. If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, “Will something,” that is tantamount to saying, “I do not mind what you will,” and that is tantamount to saying, “I have no will in the matter.” You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular. A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will—will to anything. He only wants humanity to want something. But humanity does want something. It wants ordinary morality. He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything. But we have willed something. We have willed the law against which he rebels.

All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses. If you become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton. If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon. It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense. For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with “Thou shalt not”; but it is surely obvious that “Thou shalt not” is only one of the necessary corollaries of “I will.” “I will go to the Lord Mayor’s Show, and thou shalt not stop me.” Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called “The Loves of the Triangles”; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the THING he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.

In case the point is not clear, an historic example may illustrate it. The French Revolution was really an heroic and decisive thing, because the Jacobins willed something definite and limited. They desired the freedoms of democracy, but also all the vetoes of democracy. They wished to have votes and NOT to have titles. Republicanism had an ascetic side in Franklin or Robespierre as well as an expansive side in Danton or Wilkes. Therefore they have created something with a solid substance and shape, the square social equality and peasant wealth of France. But since then the revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe has been weakened by shrinking from any proposal because of the limits of that proposal. Liberalism has been degraded into liberality. Men have tried to turn “revolutionise” from a transitive to an intransitive verb. The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would NOT rebel against, the system he would trust. But the new rebel is a Sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

It may be added that the same blank and bankruptcy can be observed in all fierce and terrible types of literature, especially in satire. Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard. When little boys in the street laugh at the fatness of some distinguished journalist, they are unconsciously assuming a standard of Greek sculpture. They are appealing to the marble Apollo. And the curious disappearance of satire from our literature is an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce about. Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of common morality behind it. He is himself more preposterous than anything he denounces. But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence. The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident. If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.
This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism, and therefore in death. The sortie has failed. The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.

Here I end (thank God) the first and dullest business of this book—the rough review of recent thought. After this I begin to sketch a view of life which may not interest my reader, but which, at any rate, interests me. In front of me, as I close this page, is a pile of modern books that I have been turning over for the purpose—a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility. By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable raftway smash could be seen from a balloon. They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum. For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness; and they have nearly reached it. He who thinks he is made of glass, thinks to the destruction of thought; for glass cannot think. So he who wills to reject nothing, wills the destruction of will; for will is not only the choice of something, but the rejection of almost everything. And as I turn and tumble over the clever, wonderful, tiresome, and useless modern books, the tide of one of them rivets my eye. It is called “Jeanne d’Arc,” by Anatole France. I have only glanced at it, but a glance was enough to remind me of Renan’s “Vie de Jesus.” It has the same strange method of the reverent sceptic. It discredits supernatural stories that have some foundation, simply by telling natural stories that have no foundation. Because we cannot believe in what a saint did, we are to pretend that we know exactly what he felt. But I do not mention either book in order to criticise it, but because the accidental combination of the names called up two startling images of Sanity which blasted all the books before me. Joan of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We KNOW that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing. It was impossible that the thought should not cross my mind that she and her faith had perhaps some secret of moral unity and utility that has been lost. And with that thought came a larger one, and the colossal figure of her Master had also crossed the theatre of my thoughts. The same modern difficulty which darkened the subject-matter of Anatole France also darkened that of Ernest Renan. Renan also divided his hero’s pity from his hero’s pugnacity. Renan even represented the righteous anger at Jerusalem as a mere nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations of Galilee. As if there were any inconsistency between having a love for humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity! Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist. Egoists (with even thinner and weaker voices) denounce Him as an altruist. In our present atmosphere such cavils are comprehensible enough. The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant. The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist. There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments. There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about. They have torn the soul of Christ into silly strips, labeled egoism and altruism, and they are equally puzzled by His insane magnificence and His insane meekness. They have parted His garments among them, and for His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top throughout.

Kapitel IV: Sagolandets etik

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother’s knee at the mere mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.

I take this instance of one of the enduring faiths because, having now to trace the roots of my personal speculation, this may be counted, I think, as the only positive bias. I was brought up a Liberal, and have always believed in democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity. If any one finds the phrase vague or threadbare, I can only pause for a moment to explain that the principle of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated in two propositions. The first is this: that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one’s own love-letters or blowing one’s own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.

But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad. Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. We will have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross.

I have first to say, therefore, that if I have had a bias, it was always a bias in favour of democracy, and therefore of tradition. Before we come to any theoretic or logical beginnings I am content to allow for that personal equation; I have always been more inclined to believe the ruck of hard-working people than to believe that special and troublesome literary class to which I belong. I prefer even the fancies and prejudices of the people who see life from the inside to the clearest demonstrations of the people who see life from the outside. I would always trust the old wives’ fables against the old maids’ facts. As long as wit is mother wit it can be as wild as it pleases.

Now, I have to put together a general position, and I pretend to no training in such things. I propose to do it, therefore, by writing down one after another the three or four fundamental ideas which I have found for myself, pretty much in the way that I found them. Then I shall roughly synthesise them, summing up my personal philosophy or natural religion; then shall describe my startling discovery that the whole thing had been discovered before. It had been discovered by Christianity. But of these profound persuasions which I have to recount in order, the earliest was concerned with this element of popular tradition. And without the foregoing explanation touching tradition and democracy I could hardly make my mental experience clear. As it is, I do not know whether I can make it clear, but I now propose to try.
My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. I generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition. The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. I knew the magic beanstalk before I had tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon. This was at one with all popular tradition. Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush. That is what the moderns mean when they say that the ancients did not “appreciate Nature,” because they said that Nature was divine. Old nurses do not tell children about the grass, but about the fairies that dance on the grass; and the old Greeks could not see the trees for the dryads.

But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on fairy tales. If I were describing them in detail I could note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them. There is the chivalrous lesson of “Jack the Giant Killer”; that giants should be killed because they are gigantic. It is a manly mutiny against pride as such. For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms, and the Jacobin has more tradition than the Jacobite. There is the lesson of “Cinderella,” which is the same as that of the Magnificat—EXALTAVIT HUMILES. There is the great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast”; that a thing must be loved BEFORE it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the “Sleeping Beauty,” which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep. But I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfand, but with the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I could speak, and shall retain when I cannot write. I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland (who are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and that necessity. For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) NECESSARY that Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting out of it. Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases: it really must be. If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the father of Jack. Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne: and we in fairyland submit. If the three brothers all ride horses, there are six animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true rationalism, and fairyland is full of it. But as I put my head over the hedge of the elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of the actual things that happened—dawn and death and so on—as if THEY were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as NECESSARY as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot IMAGINE two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail. These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity: because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how many beans make five.

Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery tales. The man of science says, “Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall”; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The witch in the fairy tale says, “Blow the horn, and the ogre’s castle will fall ”; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause. Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her reason. She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary mental connection between a horn and a falling tower. But the scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground. They do really talk as if they had found not only a set of marvellous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. They do talk as if the connection of two strange things physically connected them philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two together somehow make up a comprehensible thing. Two black riddles make a white answer.

In fairyland we avoid the word “law”; but in the land of science they are singularly fond of it. Thus they will call some interesting conjecture about how forgotten folks pronounced the alphabet, Grimm’s Law. But Grimm’s Law is far less intellectual than Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. If there is a law that pick-pockets shall go to prison, it implies that there is an imaginable mental connection between the idea of prison and the idea of picking pockets. And we know what the idea is. We can say why we take liberty from a man who takes liberties. But we cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince. As IDEAS, the egg and the chicken are further off from each other than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears. Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the “Laws of Nature.” When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is MAGIC. It is not a “law,” for we do not understand its general formula. It is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen. It is no argument for unalterable law (as Huxley fancied) that we count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility, but because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception. All the terms used in the science books, “law,” “necessity,” “order,” “tendency,” and so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched.

I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in words my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs. It is the man who talks about “a law” that he has never seen who is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy, tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.

This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this. Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales—because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. I have said that this is wholly reasonable and even agnostic. And, indeed, on this point I am all for the higher agnosticism; its better name is Ignorance. We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

But though (like the man without memory in the novel) we walk the streets with a sort of half-witted admiration, still it is admiration. It is admiration in English and not only admiration in Latin. The wonder has a positive element of praise. This is the next milestone to be definitely marked on our road through fairyland. I shall speak in the next chapter about optimists and pessimists in their intellectual aspect, so far as they have one. Here I am only trying to describe the enormous emotions which cannot be described. And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstacy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity. The goodness of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there might be more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a fairy tale. The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom. Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?

There were, then, these two first feelings, indefensible and indisputable. The world was a shock, but it was not merely shocking; existence was a surprise, but it was a pleasant surprise. In fact, all my first views were exactly uttered in a riddle that stuck in my brain from boyhood. The question was, “What did the first frog say?” And the answer was, “Lord, how you made me jump!” That says succinctly all that I am saying. God made the frog jump; but the frog prefers jumping. But when these things are settled there enters the second great principle of the fairy philosophy.
Any one can see it who will simply read “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” or the fine collections of Mr. Andrew Lang. For the pleasure of pedantry I will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy. Touchstone talked of much virtue in an “if”; according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an “if.” The note of the fairy utterance always is, “You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word ‘cow”’; or “You may live happily with the King’s daughter, if you do not show her an onion.” The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld. All the wild and whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is forbidden. Mr. W. B. Yeats, in his exquisite and piercing elfin poetry, describes the elves as lawless; they plunge in innocent anarchy on the unbridled horses of the air—
“Ride on the crest of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.“

It is a dreadful thing to say that Mr. W. B. Yeats does not understand fairyland. But I do say it. He is an ironical Irishman, full of intellectual reactions. He is not stupid enough to understand fairyland. Fairies prefer people of the yokel type like myself; people who gape and grin and do as they are told. Mr. Yeats reads into elfland all the righteous insurrection of his own race. But the lawlessness of Ireland is a Christian lawlessness, rounded on reason and justice. The Fenian is rebelling against something he understands only too well; but the true citizen of fairyland is obeying something that he does not understand at all. In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.

This is the tone of fairy tales, and it is certainly not lawlessness or even liberty, though men under a mean modern tyranny may think it liberty by comparison. People out of Portland Gaol might think Fleet Street free; but closer study will prove that both fairies and journalists are the slaves of duty. Fairy godmothers seem at least as strict as other godmothers. Cinderella received a coach out of Wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere, but she received a command— which might have come out of Brixton—that she should be back by twelve. Also, she had a glass slipper; and it cannot be a coincidence that glass is so common a substance in folk-lore. This princess lives in a glass castle, that princess on a glass hill; this one sees all things in a mirror; they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw stones. For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance most easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat. And this fairy-tale sentiment also sank into me and became my sentiment towards the whole world. I felt and feel that life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as brittle as the window-pane; and when the heavens were compared to the terrible crystal I can remember a shudder. I was afraid that God would drop the cosmos with a crash.

Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on NOT DOING SOMETHING which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do. Now, the point here is that to ME this did not seem unjust. If the miller’s third son said to the fairy, “Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace,” the other might fairly reply, “Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace.” If Cinderella says, “How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?” her godmother might answer, “How is it that you are going there till twelve?” If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. He must not look a winged horse in the mouth. And it seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture. The veto might well be as wild as the vision; it might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees.
For this reason (we may call it the fairy godmother philosophy) I never could join the young men of my time in feeling what they called the general sentiment of REVOLT. I should have resisted, let us hope, any rules that were evil, and with these and their definition I shall deal in another chapter. But I did not feel disposed to resist any rule merely because it was mysterious. Estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick or the payment of a peppercorn: I was willing to hold the huge estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal fantasy. It could not well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all. At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show my meaning. I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion’s) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip. Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since. I left the nurse guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative. But the matter for important comment was here: that when I first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales. It has taken me a long time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right. The really curious thing was this: that modern thought contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines. I have explained that the fairy tales rounded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which I have had ever since and which, crude as they were, have since hardened into convictions.

First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black. Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something has been DONE. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling that something had happened an instant before. In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure.

The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.
This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were WILFUL. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.

But modern thought also hit my second human tradition. It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions. The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But he was an imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe. He spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent Unionist talks about the Irish and their ideals. He turned mankind into a small nationality. And his evil influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honourable of later scientific authors; notably in the early romances of Mr. H. G. Wells. Many moralists have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as wicked. But Mr. Wells and his school made the heavens wicked. We should lift up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin.

But the expansion of which I speak was much more evil than all this. I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.

In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken, for the definition of a law is something that can be broken. But the machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could not be broken; for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery. We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them. The idea of the mystical condition quite disappeared; one can neither have the firmness of keeping laws nor the fun of breaking them. The largeness of this universe had nothing of that freshness and airy outbreak which we have praised in the universe of the poet. This modern universe is literally an empire; that is, it was vast, but it is not free. One went into larger and larger windowless rooms, rooms big with Babylonian perspective; but one never found the smallest window or a whisper of outer air.

Their infernal parallels seemed to expand with distance; but for me all good things come to a point, swords for instance. So finding the boast of the big cosmos so unsatisfactory to my emotions I began to argue about it a little; and I soon found that the whole attitude was even shallower than could have been expected. According to these people the cosmos was one thing since it had one unbroken rule. Only (they would say) while it is one thing it is also the only thing there is. Why, then, should one worry particularly to call it large? There is nothing to compare it with. It would be just as sensible to call it small. A man may say, “I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its crowd of varied creatures.” But if it comes to that why should not a man say, “I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number of stars and as neat a provision of live stock as I wish to see”? One is as good as the other; they are both mere sentiments. It is mere sentiment to rejoice that the sun is larger than the earth; it is quite as sane a sentiment to rejoice that the sun is no larger than it is. A man chooses to have an emotion about the largeness of the world; why should he not choose to have an emotion about its smallness?

It happened that I had that emotion. When one is fond of anything one addresses it by diminutives, even if it is an elephant or a life-guardsman. The reason is, that anything, however huge, that can be conceived of as complete, can be conceived of as small. If military moustaches did not suggest a sword or tusks a tail, then the object would be vast because it would be immeasurable. But the moment you can imagine a guardsman you can imagine a small guardsman. The moment you really see an elephant you can call it “Tiny.” If you can make a statue of a thing you can make a statuette of it. These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing; but they were not fond of the universe. But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind. Actually and in truth I did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it large. For about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life. They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred thrift. For economy is far more romantic than extravagance. To them stars were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling.

These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour and tone of certain tales. Thus I have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, “Robinson Crusoe,” which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe’s ship. That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion. I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are called so in Milton’s Eden): I hoarded the hills. For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another one.

Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable things. These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt before I could think: that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now. I felt in my bones; first, that world does not explain itself. It may be miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.