Phaethon: Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers · Chapter 3Part 3
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
P. “Of course he can. But if I did not possess the spirit of truth, how could I see any truth whatsoever?”
S. “Suppose, dear boy, that instead of your possessing it, it were possible for it to possess you; and possessing you, to show you as much of itself, or as little, as it might choose, and concerning such things only as it might choose: would not that explain the dilemma?”
P. “It would assuredly.”
S. “Let us see, then, whether this spirit of truth may not be something which is capable of possessing you, and employing you, rather than of being possessed and employed by you. To me, indeed, this spirit seems likely to be some demon or deity, and that one of the greatest.”
P. “Why then?”
S. “Can lifeless and material things see?”
P. “Certainly not; only live ones.”
S. “This spirit, then, seems to be living; for it sees things as they are.”
P. “Yes.”
S. “And it is also intellectual; for intellectual facts can be only seen by an intellectual being.”
P. “True.”
S. “And also moral; for moral facts can only be seen by a moral being.”
P. “True also.”
S. “But this spirit is evidently not a man; it remains therefore, that it must be some demon.”
P. “But why one of the greatest?”
S. “Tell me, Phaethon, is not God to be numbered among facts as they are?”
P. “Assuredly; for he is before all others and more eternal and absolute than all.”
S. “Then this spirit of truth must also be able to see God as he is.”
P. “It is probable.”
S. “And certain, if, as we agreed, it be the very spirit which sees all facts whatsoever as they are. Now tell me, can the less see the greater as it is?”
P. “I think not; for an animal cannot see a man as he is, but only that part of him in which he is like an animal, namely, his outward figure and his animal passions; but not his moral sense or reason, for of them it has itself no share.”
S. “True; and in like wise, a man of less intellect could not see a man of greater intellect than himself as he is, but only a part of his intellect.”
P. “Certainly.”
S. “And does not the same thing follow from what we said just now, that God’s conceptions of himself must be the only perfect conceptions of him? For if any being could see God as he is, the same would be able to conceive of him as he is: which we agreed was impossible.”
P. “True.”
S. “Then surely this spirit which sees God as he is, must be equal with God.”
P. “It seems probable; but none is equal to God except himself.”
S. “Most true, Phaethon. But what shall we say now, but that this spirit of truth, whereof thou hast been enamoured, is, according to the argument, none other than Zeus, who alone comprehends all things, and sees them as they are, because he alone has given to each its inward and necessary laws?”
P. “But, Socrates, there seems something impious in the thought.”
S. “Impious, truly, if we held that this spirit of truth was a part of your own self. But we agreed that it was not a part of you, but something utterly independent of you.”
P. “Noble would the news be, Socrates, were it true; yet it seems to me beyond belief.”
S. “Did we not prove just now concerning Zeus, that all mistakes concerning him were certain to be mistakes of defect?”
P. “We did, indeed.”
S. “How do you know, then, that you have not fallen into some such error, and have suspected Zeus to be less condescending towards you than he really is?”
P. “Would that it were so! But I fear it is too fair a hope.”
S. “Do I seem to thee now, dear boy, more insolent and unfeeling than Protagoras, when he tried to turn thee away from the search after absolute truth, by saying sophistically that it was an attempt of the Titans to scale heaven, and bade thee be content with asserting shamelessly and brutishly thine own subjective opinions? For I do not bid thee scale the throne of Zeus, into whose presence none could arrive, as it seems to me, unless he himself willed it; but to believe that he has given thee from thy childhood a glimpse of his own excellence, that so thy heart, conjecturing, as in the case of a veiled statue, from one part the beauty of the rest, might become enamoured thereof, and long for that sight of him which is the highest and only good, that so his splendour may give thee light to see facts as they are.”
P. “Oh Socrates! and how is this blessedness to be attained?”
S. “Even as the myths relate, the nymphs obtained the embraces of the gods; by pleasing him and obeying him in all things, lifting up daily pure hands and a thankful heart, if by any means he may condescend to purge thine eyes, that thou mayest see clearly, and without those motes, and specks, and distortions of thine own organs of vision, which flit before the eyeballs of those who have been drunk over-night, and which are called by sophists subjective truth; watching everywhere anxiously and reverently for those glimpses of his beauty, which he will vouchsafe to thee more and more as thou provest thyself worthy of them, and will reward thy love by making thee more and more partaker of his own spirit of truth; whereby, seeing facts as they are, thou wilt see him who has made them according to his own ideas, that they may be a mirror of his unspeakable splendour. Is not this a fairer hope for thee, oh Phaethon, than that which Protagoras held out to thee—that neither seeing Zeus, nor seeing facts as they are, nor affirming any truth whatsoever, nor depending for thy knowledge on any one but thine own ignorant self, thou mightest nevertheless be so fortunate as to escape punishment: not knowing, as it seems to me, that such a state of ignorance and blindfold rashness, even if Tartarus were a dream of the poets or the priests, is in itself the most fearful of punishments?”
P. “It is, indeed, my dear Socrates. Yet what are we to say of those who, sincerely loving and longing after knowledge, yet arrive at false conclusions, which are proved to be false by contradicting each other?”
S. “We are to say, Phaethon, that they have not loved knowledge enough to desire utterly to see facts as they are, but only to see them as they would wish them to be; and loving themselves rather than Zeus, have wished to remodel in some things or other his universe, according to their own subjective opinions. By this, or by some other act of self-will, or self-conceit, or self-dependence, they have compelled Zeus, not, as I think, without pity and kindness to them, to withdraw from them in some degree the sight of his own beauty. We must, therefore, I fear, liken them to Acharis, the painter of Lemnos, who, intending to represent Phœbus, painted from a mirror a copy of his own defects and deformities; or perhaps to that Nymph, who finding herself beloved by Phœbus, instead of reverently and silently returning the affection, boasted of it to all her neighbours, as a token of her own beauty, and despised the god; so that he, being angry, changed her into a chattering magpie; or again to Arachne, who having been taught the art of weaving by Athene, pretended to compete with her own instructress, and being metamorphosed by her into a spider, was condemned, like the sophists, to spin out of her own entrails endless ugly webs, which are destroyed, as soon as finished, by every slave-girl’s broom.”
P. “But shall we despise and hate such, Oh Socrates?”
S. “No, dearest boy, we will rather pity and instruct them lovingly; remembering always that we shall become such as they the moment we begin to fancy that truth is our own possession, and not the very beauty of Zeus himself, which he shows to those whom he will, and in such measure as he finds them worthy to behold. But to me, considering how great must be the condescension of Zeus in unveiling to any man, even the worthiest, the least portion of his own loveliness, there has come at times a sort of dream, that the divine splendour will at last pierce through and illumine all dark souls, even in the house of Hades, showing them, as by a great sunrise, both what they themselves, and what all other things are, really and in the sight of Zeus; which if it happened, even to Ixion, I believe that his wheel would stop, and his fetters drop off of themselves, and that he would return freely to the upper air, for as long as he himself might choose.”
Just then the people began to throng into the Pnyx; and we took our places with the rest to hear the business of the day, after Socrates had privately uttered this prayer:
“Oh Zeus, give to me and to all who shall counsel here this day, that spirit of truth by which we may behold that whereof we deliberate, as it is in thy sight!”
“As I expected,” said Templeton, with a smile, as I folded up my manuscript. “My friend the parson could not demolish the poor Professor’s bad logic without a little professional touch by way of finish.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh—never mind. Only I owe you little thanks for sweeping away any one of my lingering sympathies with Mr. Windrush, if all you can offer me instead is the confounded old nostrum of religion over again.”
“Heydey, friend! What next?”
“Really, my dear fellow, I beg your pardon, I forgot that I was speaking to a clergyman.”
“Pray don’t beg my pardon on that ground. If what you say be right, a clergyman above all others ought to hear it; and if it be wrong, and a symptom of spiritual disease, he ought to hear it all the more. But I cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, till I know what you mean by religion; for there is a great deal of very truly confounded and confounding religion abroad in the world just now, as there has been in all ages; and perhaps you may be alluding to that.”
Templeton sat silent for a few minutes, playing with the tackle in his fly-book, and then murmured to himself the well-known lines of Lucretius:
“Humana ante oculos fœde cum vita jaceret In terris oppressa gravi sub Relligione Quæ caput a cœli regionibus ostendebat, Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans.
There!—blasphemous reprobate fellow, am I not?”
“On the contrary,” I said, “I think that in the sense in which Lucretius intended that the lines should be taken, they contain a great deal of truth. He had seen the basest and foullest crimes spring from that which he calls Relligio, and he had a full right to state that fact. I am not aware that one blasphemes the Catholic and Apostolic Faith by saying that the devilries of the Spanish Inquisition were the direct offspring of that ‘religious sentiment’ which Mr. Windrush’s school—though they are at all events right in saying that its source is in man himself, and not in the ‘regionibus Cœli’—are now glorifying, as something which enables man to save his own soul without the interference of ‘The Deity’—indeed, whether ‘The Deity’ chooses or not.”
“Do leave these poor Emersonians alone for a few minutes, and tell me how you can reconcile what you have just said with your own dialogue.”
“Why not?”
“Is not Lucretius glorying in the notion that the gods do not trouble themselves with mortals, while you have been asserting that ‘The Deity’ troubles Himself even with the souls of heathens?”
“Certainly. But that is quite a distinct matter from his dislike of what he calls Relligio. In that dislike I can sympathise fully: but on his method of escape Mr. Windrush will probably look with more complaisance than I do, who call it by the ugly name of Atheism.”
“Then I fear you would call me an Atheist, if you knew all. So we had better say no more about it.”
“A most curious speech, certainly, to make to a parson, or soul-curer by profession!”
“Why, what on earth have you to do but to abhor and flee me?” asked he, with a laugh, though by no means a merry one.
“Would your having a headache be a reason for the medical man’s running away from you, or coming to visit you?”
“Ah, but this, you know, is my ‘fault,’ and my ‘crime,’ and my ‘sin.’ Eh?” and he laughed again.
“Would the doctor visit you the less, because it was your own fault that your head ached?”
“Ah, but suppose I professed openly no faith in his powers of curing, and had a great hankering after unaccredited Homœopathies, like Mr. Windrush’s; would not that be a fair cause for interdiction from fire and water, sacraments and Christian burial?”
“Come, come, Templeton,” I said; “you shall not thus jest away serious thoughts with an old friend. I know you are ill at ease. Why not talk over the matter with me fairly and soberly? How do you know till you have tried, whether I can help you or not?”
“Because I know that your arguments will have no force with me; they will demand of me or assume in me, certain faculties, sentiments, notions, experiences—call them what you like; I am beginning to suspect sometimes with Cabanis that they are ‘a product of the small intestines’—which I never have had, and never could make myself have, and now don’t care whether I have them or not.”
“On my honour, I will address you only as what you are, and know yourself to be. But what are these faculties, so strangely beyond my friend Templeton’s reach? He used to be distinguished at college for a very clear head, and a very kind heart, and the nicest sense of honour which I ever saw in living man; and I have not heard that they have failed him since he became Templeton of Templeton. And as for his Churchmanship, were not the county papers ringing last month with the accounts of the beautiful new church which he had built, and the stained glass which he brought from Belgium, and the marble font which he brought from Italy; and how he had even given for an altar-piece his own pet Luini, the gem of Templeton House?”
“Effeminate picture!” he said. “It was part and parcel of the idea—”
Before I could ask him what he meant, he looked up suddenly at me, with deep sadness on his usually nonchalant face.
“Well, my dear fellow, I suppose I must tell you all, as I have told you so much without your shaking the dust off your feet against me, and consulting Bradshaw for the earliest train to Shrewsbury. You knew my dear mother?”
“I did. The best of women.”
“The best of women, and the best of mothers. But, if you recollect, she was a great Low-Church saint.”
“Why ‘but’? How does that derogate in any wise from her excellence?”
“Not from her excellence; God forbid! or from the excellence of the people of her own party, whom she used to have round her, and who were, some of them, I do believe, as really earnest, and pious, and charitable, and all that, as human beings could be. But it did take away very much indeed from her influence on me.”
“Surely she did not neglect to teach you.”
“It is a strange thing to say, but she rather taught me too much. I don’t deny that it may have been my own fault. I don’t blame her, or any one. But you know what I was at college—no worse than other men, I dare say; but no better. I had no reason for being better.”
“No reason? Surely she gave you reasons.”
“There—you have touched the ailing nerve now. The reasons were what you would call paralogisms. They had no more to do with me than with those trout.”
“You mistake, friend, you mistake, indeed,” said I.
“I don’t mistake at all about this; that whether or not the reasons in themselves had to do with me, the way in which she put them made them practically so much Hebrew. She demanded of me, as the only grounds on which I was to consider myself safe from hell, certain fears and hopes which I did not feel, and experiences which I did not experience; and it was my fault, and a sign of my being in a wrong state—to use no harder term—that I did not feel them; and yet it was only God’s grace which could make me feel them: and so I grew up with a dark secret notion that I was a very bad boy; but that it was God’s fault and not mine that I was so.”
“You were ripe indeed then,” said I sadly, “like hundreds more, for Professor Windrush’s teaching.”
“I will come to that presently. But in the meantime—was it my fault? I was never what you call a devout person. My ‘organ of veneration,’ as the phrenologists would say, was never very large. I was a shrewd dashing boy, enjoying life to the finger-tips, and enjoying above all, I will say, pleasing my mother in every way, except in the understanding what she told me—and what I felt I could not understand. But as I grew older, and watched her, and the men round her, I began to suspect that religion and effeminacy had a good deal to do with each other. For the women, whatsoever their temperaments, or even their tastes might be, took to this to me incomprehensible religion naturally and instinctively; while the very few men who were in their clique were—I don’t deny some of them were good men enough—if they had been men at all: if they had been well-read, or well-bred, or gallant, or clear-headed, or liberal-minded, or, in short, anything but the silky, smooth-tongued hunt-the-slippers nine out of ten of them were. I recollect well asking my mother once, whether there would not be five times more women than men in heaven—and her answering me sadly and seriously, that she feared there would be. And in the meantime she brought me up to pray and hope that I might some day be converted, and become a child of God—And one could not help wishing to enjoy oneself as much as possible before that event happened.”
“Before that event happened, my dear fellow? Pardon me, but your tone is somewhat irreverent.”
“Very likely. I had no reason put before me for regarding such a change as anything but an unpleasant doom, which would cut me off, or ought to do so, from field sports, from poetry, from art, from science, from politics—for Christians, I was told, had nothing to do with the politics of this world—from man and all man’s civilisation, in short; and leave to me, as the only two lawful indulgences, those of living in a good house, and begetting a family of children.”
“And did you throw off the old Creeds for the sake of the civilisation which you fancied that they forbid?”
“No. I am a Churchman, you know; principally on political grounds, or from custom, or from—the devil knows what, perhaps—I do not.”
“Probably it is God, and not the devil, who knows why, Templeton.”
“Be it so—Frightful as it is to have to say it—I do not so much care—I suppose it is all right: if it is not, it will all come right at last. And in the meantime, I compromise, like the rest of the world; and hear Jane making the children every week-day pray that they may become God’s children, and then teaching them every Sunday evening the Catechism, which says that they are so already. I don’t understand it—I suppose if it was important, one would understand it. One knows right from wrong, you know, and other fundamentals. If that were necessary, one would know that too.”
“But can you submit quietly to such a barefaced contradiction?”
“I? I am only a plain country squire. Of course I should call such dealing with an Act of Parliament a lie and a sham—But about these things, I fancy, the women know best. Jane is ten thousand times as good as I am—you don’t know half her worth—And I haven’t the heart to contradict her—nor the right either; for I have no reasons to give her; no faith to substitute for hers.”
“Our friend, the High-Church curate, could have given you a few plain reasons, I should think.”
“Of course he could. And I believe in my heart the man is in the right in calling Jane wrong. He has honesty and common sense on his side, just as he has when he calls the present state of Convocation, in the face of that prayer for God’s Spirit on its deliberations, a blasphemous lie and sham. Of course it is. Any ensign in a marching regiment could tell us that from his mere sense of soldier’s honour. But then—if she is wrong, is he right? How do I know? I want reasons: he gives me historic authorities.”
“And very good things too; for they are fair phenomena for induction.”
“But how will proving to me that certain people once thought a thing right prove to me that it is right? Good people think differently every day. Good people have thought differently about those very matters in every age. I want some proof which will coincide with the little which I do know about science and philosophy. They must fight out their own battle, if they choose to fight it on mere authority. If one could but have the implicit faith of a child, it would be all very well: but one can’t. If one has once been fool enough to think about these things, one must have reasons, or something better than mere ipse dixits, or one can’t believe them. I should be glad enough to believe; do you suppose that I don’t envy poor dear Jane from morning to night?—but I can’t. And so—”
“And so what?” asked I.
“And so, I believe, I am growing to have no religion at all, and no substitute for it either; for I feel I have no ground or reason for admiring or working out any subject. I have tired of philosophy. Perhaps it’s all wrong—at least I can’t see what it has to do with God, and Christianity, and all which, if it is true, must be more important than anything else. I have tired of art for the same reason. How can I be anything but a wretched dilettante, when I have no principles to ground my criticism on, beyond bosh about ‘The Beautiful’? I did pluck up heart and read Mr. Ruskin’s books greedily when they came out, because I heard he was a good Christian. But I fell upon a little tract of his, ‘Notes on Sheepfolds,’ and gave him up again, when I found that he had a leaning to that ‘Clapham sect.’ I have dropped politics: for I have no reason, no ground, no principle in them, but expediency. When they asked me this summer to represent the interests of the county in Parliament, I asked them how they came to make such a mistake as to fancy that I knew what was their interest, or anyone else’s? I am becoming more and more of an animal; fragmentary, inconsistent, seeing to the root of nothing, unable to unite things in my own mind. I just do the duty which lies nearest, and looks simplest. I try to make the boys grow up plucky and knowing—though what’s the use of it? They will go to college with even less principles than I had, and will get into proportionably worse scrapes, I expect to be ruined by their debts before I die. And for the rest, I read nothing but “The Edinburgh” and “The Agricultural Gazette.” My talk is of bullocks. I just know right from wrong enough to see that the farms are in good order, pay my labourers living wages, keep the old people out of the workhouse, and see that my cottages and schools are all right; for I suppose I was put here for some purpose of that kind—though what it is I can’t very clearly define—And there’s an end of my long story.”
“Not quite an animal yet, it seems?” said I with a smile, half to hide my own sadness at a set of experiences which are, alas! already far too common, and will soon be more common still.
“Nearer it than you fancy. I am getting fonder and fonder of a good dinner and a second bottle of claret—about their meaning there is no mistake. And my principal reason for taking the hounds two years ago was, I do believe, to have something to do in the winter which required no thought, and to have an excuse for falling asleep after dinner, instead of arguing with Jane about her scurrilous religious newspapers—There is a great gulf opening, I see, between me and her—And as I can’t bridge it over I may as well forget it. Pah! I am boring you, and over-talking myself. Have a cigar, and let us say no more about it. There is more here, old fellow, than you will cure by doses of Socratic Dialectics.”
“I am not so sure of that,” I replied. “On the contrary, I should recommend you in your present state of mind to look out your old Plato as quickly as possible, and see if he and his master Socrates cannot give you, if not altogether a solution for your puzzle, at least a method whereby you may solve it yourself. But tell me first—What has all this to do with your evident sympathy for a man so unlike yourself as Professor Windrush?”
“Perhaps I feel for him principally because he has broken loose from it all in desperation, just as I have. But, to tell you the truth, I have been reading more than one book of his school lately; and, as I said, I owe you no thanks for demolishing the little comfort which I seemed to find in them.”
“And what was that then?”
“Why—in the first place, you can’t deny that however incoherent they may be they do say a great many clever things, and noble things too, about man, and society, and art, and nature.”
“No doubt of it.”
“And moreover, they seem to connect all they say with—with—I suppose you will laugh at me—with God, and spiritual truths, and eternal Divine laws; in short, to consecrate common matters in that very way, which I could not find in my poor mother’s teaching.”
“No doubt of that either. And therein is one real value of them, as protests in behalf of something nobler and more unselfish than the mere dollar-getting spirit of their country.”
“Well, then, can you not see how pleasant it was to me to find someone who would give me a peep into the unseen world, without requiring as an entrance-fee any religious emotions and experiences? Here I had been for years, shut out; told that I had no business with anything eternal, and pure, and noble, and good; that to all intents and purposes I was nothing better than a very cunning animal who could be damned; because I was still ‘carnal,’ and had not been through all Jane’s mysterious sorrows and joys. And it was really good news to me to hear that they were not required after all, and that all I need do was to be a good man, and leave devotion to those who were inclined to it by temperament.”
“Not to be a good man,” said I, “but only a good specimen of some sort of man. That, I think, would be the outcome of Emerson’s ‘Representative Men,’ or of those most tragic ‘Memoirs of Margaret Puller Ossoli.’”
“How then, hair-splitter? What is the mighty difference?”
“Would you call Dick Turpin a good man, because he was a good highwayman?”
“What now?”
“That he would be an excellent representative man of his class; and therefore, on Mr. Emerson’s grounds, a fit subject for a laudatory lecture.”
“I hate reductiones ad absurdum. Let Turpin take care of himself. I suppose I do not belong to such a very bad sort of men, but that it may be worth my while to become a good specimen of it?”
“Certainly not; only I think, contrary to Mr. Emerson’s opinion, that you will not become even that, unless you first become something better still, namely, a good man.”
“There you are too refined for me. But can you not understand, now, the causes of my sympathy even with Windrush and his ‘spirit of truth’?”
“I can, and those of many more. It seems that you thought you found in that school a wider creed than the one to which you had been accustomed?”