“Quite casually ignorant”

Now against the specialist, against the man who studies only art or electricity, or the violin, or the thumbscrew or what not, there is only one really important argument, and that, for some reason or other, is never offered.  People say that specialists are inhuman; but that is unjust.  People say an expert is not a man; but that is unkind and untrue.  The real difficulty about the specialist or expert is much more singular and fascinating.  The trouble with the expert is never that he is not a man; it is always that wherever he is not an expert he is too much of an ordinary man.  Wherever he is not exceptionally learned he is quite casually ignorant.  This is the great fallacy in the case of what is called the impartiality of men of science.  If scientific men had no idea beyond their scientific work it might be all very well — that is to say, all very well for everybody except them.  But the truth is that, beyond their scientific ideas, they have not the absence of ideas but the presence of the most vulgar and sentimental ideas that happen to be common to their social clique.  If a biologist had no views on art and morals it might be all very well.  The truth is that the biologist has all the wrong views of art and morals that happen to be going about in the smart set of his time.

– William Blake (1910)

“Huge hieroglyphics”

One often wonders what the world of the future will really think of our present epoch.  It is all very well to say that they will find plenty of documents and an enormous amount of printed matter.  Our newspaper language is obvious because it is printed in large letters.  The names over our shops are obvious because they are printed in large letters. They are not obvious in any other sense. We think them simple because we know what they mean. But they are not by any means things of which one can say generally that it is easy to know what they mean. Take the first case that comes to hand.  Suppose the traveller from New Zealand saw over a big London building the words “Child’s Bank”, I suppose he would think it meant a child’s money-box.  We read it quite simply and swiftly and in another sense; but then, so did the ancient Egyptians read simply and swiftly the huge hieroglyphics that we can hardly decipher.  When they saw a moon, six suns, a human hand, a lotus, and five birds standing on one leg, they immediately burst out laughing, because it was a joke. But our descendants, even if they know our language, may well have almost as much trouble with us as we have with Egypt. The opportunities for a natural error are so infinite; as in the case of Child’s Bank.

I remember when I was a little boy (I was a poetical and unpleasant little boy) I always read the words “Job-Master” over some neighbouring door, as if the first word were the Job of the Old Testament.  I also remember that over a shop of hatters or hosiers in Kensington were written the words “Hope Brothers.”  I supposed this to be an inspiring address to mankind, urging them not to fall into an impotent pessimism.  I have since found that the thing has another and less invigorating meaning; and I am even able to appreciate the irony of the fact that over another establishment of an analogous kind is written “Hope, Limited”.  Try the experiment for yourself with almost any words on which your eye happens to fall.  At the moment when I am writing (with fevered brow) this article, the words on which my eye falls first are “Typewriting Office,” written backwards on a windowpane.  That reminds me of an example.  I once wrote a rather silly book about twelve historic figures whom I chose to consider symbolic — St. Francis of Assisi, Charles II, Tolstoy, and so on.  As a book must have a name I called it “Twelve Types”.  I afterwards discovered that it had some sale as a book about technical printing; I found it myself in a library for working printers.  I hope the poor brutes didn’t read it.

– The Illustrated London News, 12 September 1908.

“A castle in the clouds”

There is all the difference between fancying there are fairies in the wood, which often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really frightening ourselves until we walk a mile rather than pass a house we have told ourselves is haunted.  Behind all these things is the fact that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to stir the deep things of the soul. We all understand that and the pagans understood it. The point is that paganism did not really stir the soul except with these doubts and fancies, with the consequence that we to-day can have little beyond doubts and fancies about paganism. All the best critics agree that all the greatest poets, in pagan Hellas for example, had an attitude towards their gods which is quite queer and puzzling to men in the Christian era. There seems to be an admitted conflict between the god and the man; but everybody seems to be doubtful about which is the hero and which is the villain.  This doubt does not merely apply to a doubter like Euripides in the Bacchae; it applies to a moderate conservative like Sophocles in the Antigone; or even to a regular Tory and reactionary like Aristophanes in the Frogs.  Sometimes it would seem that the Greeks believed above all things in reverence, only they had nobody to revere. But the point of the puzzle is this, that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that the whole thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“His extra limbs”

For there is nothing that is really cut off from man or really independent of him in the whole human world. All tools are, as it were, his extra limbs. The chair he sits on is only a system of wooden legs. When he lies on a bed he does not turn himself into a quadruped which (like the elephant) sleeps standing up. If any of these limbs or props of man were to fail him it would be a failure of man. When he invents the most fantastic monstrosities of mechanism, he is only turning himself, as it were, into a monstrosity, into a Briareus, or a centipede. The wooden railway signals are only the wild arms of man waving warnings to his children. The lamps of gas or electricity are only the innumerable eyes of man peering into every dark place and every corner of crime. His passionate pulse is throbbing in the pulse of every passionless machine; his nerves are tingling in the last faint filaments of thread or wire. All the mills of the world labour swiftly because the swiftest thing of all is the ancient desire of the heart. If ever man is to die, these things will die long before him. So long as man lives and has human faith and hope, these things will in innumerable forms continually go forth from him.

- The Illustrated London News, 4 August 1906.

“Things seen through the veil”

. . .the first fact is that the most simple people have the most subtle ideas.  Everybody ought to know that, for everybody has been a child.  Ignorant as a child is, he knows more than he can say and feels not only atmospheres but fine shades. And in this matter there are several fine shades. Nobody understands it who has not had what can only be called the ache of the artist to find some sense and some story in the beautiful things he sees; his hunger for secrets and his anger at any tower or tree escaping with its tale untold. He feels that nothing is perfect unless it is personal. Without that the blind unconscious beauty of the world stands in its garden like a headless statue.  One need only be a very minor poet to have wrestled with the tower or the tree until it spoke like a titan or a dryad.  It is often said that pagan mythology was a personification of the powers of nature. The phrase is true in a sense, but it is very unsatisfactory; because it implies that the forces are abstractions and the personification is artificial.  Myths are not allegories. Natural powers are not in this case abstractions.  It is not as if there were a God of Gravitation.  There may be a genius of the waterfall; but not of mere falling, even less than of mere water. The impersonation is not of something impersonal.  The point is that the personality perfects the water with significance. Father Christmas is not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man.  He is something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the evergreens, so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold.  The test therefore is purely imaginative.  But imaginative does not mean imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call subjective, when they mean false.  Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“Too humble to be convinced”

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.

– Orthodoxy (1908).

The Book of Job

It obviously stands over against the Iliad and the Greek tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and parting of poetry and philosophy in the mornings of the world. It is a solemn and uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really perfects the pagan tragic irony, precisely because it is more monotheistic and therefore more mystical. Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted.  Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say ‘I do not understand,’ it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding. But this mighty monotheistic poem remained unremarked by the whole world of antiquity, which was thronged with polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the way in which the Jews stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, that they should have kept a thing like the Book of Job out of the whole intellectual world of antiquity.  It is as if the Egyptians had modestly concealed the Great Pyramid.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“How splendid they all are!”

The whole of life becomes so very jolly and livable when once we have believed in original sin. If we believe (as some, I am told, do today) that every man is born innocent – then I can only say that to such a believer every man must appear a devil. The words of the wildest pessimist, of the wildest diabolist, seem hardly equal to expressing the vastness of that inventive villainy. By what abominable cleverness, by what hateful wit, did that sinless child contrive to twist himself into such a terror as an ordinary man? But if we realize all ordinary men to be at one ordinary disadvantage, how simple all their struggles become! The ordinary man can be considerate towards the ordinary man as one private soldier is towards another engaged against the same enemy. If once men are under original sin, how splendid they all are!

- The Illustrated London News, 27 January 2006.

“The largest idea of all”

It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing to say that the god of the stranger may be as good as our own; and doubtless the pagans thought themselves very liberal and enlightened when they agreed to add to the gods of the city or the hearth some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming down from the mountains or some shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of the woods.  But exactly what it lost by these larger ideas is the largest idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole world one.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“Explanations from the disputed”

I read the other day in some philosophical magazine or other that some Professor whose name I forget (why not say Posh?) was the most conscientious and thorough investigator of ethical origins; and that Posh had come to the conclusion that the old doctrine of a definite thing called the conscience could not be maintained.  If I were to say that I had swum to an island where I learnt that there was no such thing as swimming, you would think it a rather odd remark.  If I told you that I had read a book which conclusively proved to me that I could not read, your lips might murmur faintly the word “paradox”.  If I were to say that I had seen a diagram which distinctly proved me to be blind, it is barely possible that you would not believe me.  Yet I wonder how many mild but intelligent modern mortals would have read or have read that phrase in the philosophical magazine, and not seen anything absurd in the idea of a man conscientiously discovering that he has no conscience.

This is the most irritating of all the modern illogicalities.  I mean the habit of beginning with something of which we are doubtful and expounding (or even denying) in the light of it that of which we are certain.  Superficially and to start with, it is obvious that the world around us may be almost anything; it may be anarchy or Providence or inevitable progress, or mere natural routine; there is something to be said for its being Hell.  The thing of which we are certain is ourselves, and the existence or non-existence in us of such things as a moral sense or the art of swimming.  That is the first situation; the origin of all religion and all irreligion.  But these extraordinary Professors ask me to begin with evolution and all sorts of things that may never even have occurred; and in the light of them discuss whether my own experiences have occurred.  They light up the certain with explanations from the disputed.  Now I am not passionately anxious to be explained; and I resolutely refuse to be explained away.  Drive me away, if I sufficiently submissive.  Carry me away, if I am sufficiently portable.  But do not imagine that you can explain me away and that I shall accept the explanation in a gentlemanly spirit;  do not suppose that you can either browbeat or persuade me out of the mystic and primordial certainty that I am that I am.  The point is very obvious; and yet the missing of it is responsible for a forest of mistakes that are growing round us on every side and in every question.  Generalizations absorb and employ details, but they cannot abolish them.  General knowledge may prove that your experience is general, or it may prove that it is not general; but it cannot prove that it is not genuine.  And yet in almost every one of the practical points in dispute in our society, people are being worried and poisoned and misled by this quite infantile fallacy.

– The Illustrated London News, 20 February 1909.