“A difference about death and daylight”

A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss.  Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house. But the negative side of it is quite as noble as well as quite as strong. Men fight hardest when they feel that the foe is at once an old enemy and an eternal stranger, that his atmosphere is alien and antagonistic, as the French feel about the Prussian or the Eastern Christians about the Turk.  If we say it is a difference of religion, people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas. We will pity them and say it is a difference about death and daylight; a difference that does really come like a dark shadow between our eyes and the day.  Men can think of this difference even at the point of death; for it is a difference about the meaning of life.

. . .There is a religious war when two worlds meet; that is when two visions of the world meet; or in more modern language when two moral atmospheres meet. What is the one man’s breath is the other man’s poison; and it is vain to talk of giving a pestilence a place in the sun.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“Galloping plagiarism”

There is a thing which is often called progress, but which only occurs in dull and stale conditions: it is indeed, not progress, but a sort of galloping plagiarism.  To carry the same fashion further and further is not a mark of energy, but a mark of fatigue.  One can fancy that in the fantastic decline of some Chinese civilization one might find things automatically increasing, simply because everybody had forgotten what the things were meant for.  Hats might be bigger than umbrellas, because every one had forgotten to wear them.  Walking sticks might be taller than lances, because nobody ever thought of taking them out on a walk.  The human mind never goes so fast as that except when it has got into a groove.

– The Living Age, 21 August 1909.

Confucius

Confucius was not a religious founder or even a religious teacher; possibly not even a religious man.  He was not an atheist; he was apparently what we call an agnostic.  But the really vital point is that it is utterly irrelevant to talk about his religion at all. It is like talking of theology as the first thing in the story of how Rowland Hill established the postal system or Baden Powell organised the Boy Scouts.  Confucius was not there to bring a message from heaven to humanity, but to organise China; and he must have organised it exceedingly well.  It follows that he dealt much with morals; but he bound them up strictly with manners. The peculiarity of his scheme and of his country, in which it contrasts with its great pendant the system of Christendom, is that he insisted on perpetuating an external life with all its forms, that outward continuity might preserve internal peace. Anyone who knows how much habit has to do with health, of mind as well as body, will see the truth in his idea. But he will also see that the ancestor-worship and the reverence for the Sacred Emperor were habits and not creeds.  It is unfair to the great Confucius to say he was a religious founder. It is even unfair to him to say he was not a religious founder. It is as unfair as going out of one’s way to say that Jeremy Bentham was not a Christian martyr.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“Beginning with the indisputable thing”

This is the essential idea, that all good argument consists in beginning with the indisputable thing and then disputing everything else in the light of it.  It is of great working value in many modern discussions, if its general principle is understood.  First of all, of course, one must leave out the element of the supernatural or the element of the insane.  The element of the supernatural in practical affairs has always been regarded (even by those who most strongly believed in it) as exceptional.  If a miracle is not exceptional, it is not even miraculous.  Nobody was ever taught by any sane creed to count upon or expect anything but the natural.  To put the point briefly, we are commanded to put our faith in miracles, but not to put our trust in them.  The other alternative of mania or some mental breakdown must also be allowed for.  If we have been seriously assured that there are no snakes in Iceland and in spite of that we see snakes in Iceland, it is always reasonable to ask ourselves if our past life has pointed towards “D.T.”  But supposing that those two abnormalities, the mystery that is above humanity and the madness that is below it, are fairly and honestly out of the question, then the right line of argument certainly is that seeing is believing and that the things we have experienced are true in quite another and more pungent sense than the things into which we can merely be argued.  If I am sitting opposite my aunt in Croydon, a telegram may come from her in Highgate, a newspaper may announce that she is taking part in a Highgate Pageant, an expert may prove that it was impossible for her to have reached Croydon in the time, a statistician may say that he has counted all the aunts in Highgate, and there is not one missing; but all these facts are facts of a secondary degree of evidence.  They have the expert, but I have the aunt.  Unless my aunt is a devil, or I am a lunatic, I have possession of the primary fact in the discussion.

I have already said that this very plain principle of thought is useful in connection with many current problems.  Take, for example, the problem of the Unemployed.  It is very common to meet a prosperous gentleman who will point to a seedy and half-starved loafer in the street, and say: “This unemployment business is all bosh: I offered that man work the other day, and he wouldn’t take it.”  Now, this may possibly be true; but it is always used in order to disprove the idea that the man is miserable.  But to disprove that is simply to disprove the one thing that is proved.  You have only to look at the man to say that, for some reason, by somebody’s fault, or nobody’s fault, he has not eaten enough to be a man, or even to be an animal.  That he refused work is a curious circumstance, to be reconciled, if possible, with the palpable fact that he wants money.  He may have refused it because he is half-witted, or because fatigue has killed all power of choice, or because wrong has moved him to an irrational anger, or because he is a saint, or because he is a maniac, or because he is terrorised by a secret society, or because he has a peculiar religion which forbids him to work on Wednesday.  But whatever the explanation is, it is not that he is jolly and full of meat and drink; because you can see that he isn’t.  His impotence may have this cause or that cause, or the other; but his impotence is no defence of the existing system of wealth and poverty.  To use the modern cant, it does not destroy the problem of the unemployed; it only adds to the problem of the unemployable.  But our main point here is this: that people ought to begin by the thing that they can see.  It may take you twenty years to find whether a man is honest.  But it does not take you two seconds to find out that he is thin.  The ordinary rich man’s argument is that because the tramp is dishonest, he must somehow be secretly fat.  That is the great fallacy.  Believe me (I speak as an expert), it is impossible to be fat in secret.

– The Illustrated London News, 7 November 1908.

“Black magic”

I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology.  I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them. And indeed that popular phase exactly expresses the point. The gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective; that it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope of meeting a nymph.  It was an adventure rather than an assignation.  But the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that he had broken them.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“A stockbroker”

A stockbroker in one sense really is a very poetical figure. In one sense he is as poetical as Shakespeare, and his ideal poet, since he does give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. He does deal to a great extent in what economists (in their poetical way) describe as imaginaries.  When he exchanges two thousand Patagonian Pumpkins for one thousand shares in Alaskan Whale Blubber, he does not demand the sensual satisfaction of eating the pumpkin or need to behold the whale with the gross eye of flesh. It is quite possible that there are no pumpkins; and if there is somewhere such a thing as a whale, it is very unlikely to obtrude itself upon the conversation in the Stock Exchange. Now what is the matter with the financial world is that it is a great deal too full of imagination, in the sense of fiction. And when we react against it, we naturally in the first place react into realism.

– The Outline of Sanity (1926).

A stockbroker in one sense really is a very poetical figure.
In one sense he is as poetical as Shakespeare, and his ideal poet,
since he does give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
He does deal to a great extent in what economists (in their poetical way)
describe as imaginaries.  When he exchanges two thousand
Patagonian Pumpkins for one thousand shares in Alaskan Whale Blubber,
he does not demand the sensual satisfaction of eating the pumpkin
or need to behold the whale with the gross eye of flesh.
It is quite possible that there are no pumpkins; and if there
is somewhere such a thing as a whale, it is very unlikely
to obtrude itself upon the conversation in the Stock Exchange.
Now what is the matter with the financial world is that it is
a great deal too full of imagination, in the sense of fiction.
And when we react against it, we naturally in the first place
react into realism.

“Not the same even when they are the same”

Those who talk about Pagan Christs have less sympathy with Paganism than with Christianity.  Those who call these cults ‘religions,’ and ‘compare’ them with the certitude and challenge of the Church have much less appreciation than we have of what made heathenism human, or of why classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.  It is no very human tenderness for the hungry to prove that hunger is the same as food.  It is no very genial  understanding of youth to argue that hope destroys the need for happiness. And it is utterly unreal to argue that these images in the mind, admired entirely in the abstract, were even in the same world with a living man and a living polity that were worshipped because they were concrete.  We might as well say that a boy playing at robbers is the same as a man in his first day in the trenches; or that boy’s first fancies about ‘the not impossible she’ are the same as the sacrament of marriage.  They are fundamentally different exactly where they are superficially similar; we might almost say they are not the same even when they are the same. They are only different because one is real and the other is not. I do not mean merely that I myself believe that one is true and the other is not.  I mean that one was never meant to be true in the same sense as the other.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“A memorial of nothing”

The elusive, enormous, and nameless thing, with which I have so long wrestled, as with a slippery leviathan, in such places as this, suddenly heaved in sight the other day and took on a sort of formless form.  I am always getting these brief glimpses of the monster, though they seldom last long enough for me to make head or tail of it.  In this case it appeared in a short letter to the Daily Express, which ran, word for word, as follows:

In reply to your article ‘What Youth Wants in Church,’ I assert that it does not want sadness, ceremony, or humbug.  Youth wants to know only about the present and future, not about what happened 2000 years ago.  If the churches forsake these things, young people will flock to them.

The syntax is a little shaky, and the writer does not mean that the young people will flock to the things that happened 2000 years ago if only the churches will desert them.   He does actually mean (what is much more extraordinary) that the young people will flock to the churches merely because the churches have forsaken all the original objects of their existence.  Every feature of every church, from a cross on a spire to an old hymn-book left in a pew, refers more or less to certain things that happened about 2000 years ago.  If we do not want to be reminded of these things, the natural inference is that we do not want any of the buildings built to remind us of them.  So far from flocking to them, we shall naturally desire to get away from them; or still more to clear them away.  But I cannot understand why something which is unpopular because of what it means should become frightfully popular because it no longer means anything.  A War Memorial is a memorial of the war, and I can imagine that those who merely hate the memory might merely hate the memorial.  But what would be the sense of saying that, if only all the names of the dead were scraped off the War Memorial, huge pilgrimages would be made from all ends of the earth to visit and venerate the absence of names on a memorial of nothing?

– All is Grist (1931).

“Through the imagination alone”

Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian.  He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods.  And the real break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had ignorantly worshipped.

The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to this view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them.  But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom.  Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion.  The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.  Mythology, then, sought god through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty, in the sense in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque ugliness. But the imagination has its own laws and therefore its own triumphs, which neither logicians nor men of science can understand. It remained true to that imaginative instinct through a thousand extravagances, through every crude cosmic pantomime of a pig eating the moon or the world being cut out of a cow, through all the dizzy convolutions and mystic malformations of Asiatic art, through all the stark and staring rigidity of Egyptian and Assyrian portraiture, through every kind of cracked mirror of mad art that seemed to deform the world and displace the  sky, it remained true to something about which there can be no argument; something that makes it possible for some artist of some school to stand suddenly still before that particular deformity and say, ‘My dream has come true.’  Therefore do we all in fact feel that pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are wise enough not to inquire what they suggest. Therefore we all feel what is meant by Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, until some prig of a pessimist or progressive person explains what it means.  Therefore we all know the meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told. In this sense it is true that it is the ignorant who accept myths, but only because it is the ignorant who appreciate poems.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“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)