CHESTERTON-ALL THING CONSIDERED - SCIENCE AND RELIGION
I Saw in a newspaper paragraph the other day the following entertaining
and deeply philosophical incident. A man was enlisting as a soldier at
Portsmouth, and some form was put before him to be filled up, common, I
suppose, to all such cases, in which was, among other things, an inquiry
about what was his religion. With an equal and ceremonial gravity the
man wrote down the word "Methuselahite." Whoever looks over such papers
must, I should imagine, have seen some rum religions in his time; unless
the Army is going to the dogs. But with all his specialist knowledge he
could not "place" Methuselahism among what Bossuet called the variations
of Protestantism. He felt a fervid curiosity about the tenets and
tendencies of the sect; and he asked the soldier what it meant. The
soldier replied that it was his religion "to live as long as he could."
Now, considered as an incident in the religious history of Europe, that
answer of that soldier was worth more than a hundred cartloads of
quarterly and monthly and weekly and daily papers discussing religious
problems and religious books. Every day the daily paper reviews some new
philosopher who has some new religion; and there is not in the whole two
thousand words of the whole two columns one word as witty as or wise as
that word "Methuselahite." The whole meaning of literature is simply to
cut a long story short; that is why our modern books of philosophy are
never literature. That soldier had in him the very soul of literature;
he was one of the great phrase-makers of modern thought, like Victor
Hugo or Disraeli. He found one word that defines the paganism of to-day.
Henceforward, when the modern philosophers come to me with their new
religions (and there is always a kind of queue of them waiting all the
way down the street) I shall anticipate their circumlocutions and be
able to cut them short with a single inspired word. One of them will
begin, "The New Religion, which is based upon that Primordial Energy in
Nature...." "Methuselahite," I shall say sharply; "good morning." "Human
Life," another will say, "Human Life, the only ultimate sanctity, freed
from creed and dogma...." "Methuselahite!" I shall yell. "Out you go!"
"My religion is the Religion of Joy," a third will explain (a bald old
man with a cough and tinted glasses), "the Religion of Physical Pride
and Rapture, and my...." "Methuselahite!" I shall cry again, and I shall
slap him boisterously on the back, and he will fall down. Then a pale
young poet with serpentine hair will come and say to me (as one did only
the other day): "Moods and impressions are the only realities, and these
are constantly and wholly changing. I could hardly therefore define my
religion...." "I can," I should say, somewhat sternly. "Your religion is
to live a long time; and if you stop here a moment longer you won't
fulfil it."
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old
vice. We have had the sophist who defends cruelty, and calls it
masculinity. We have had the sophist who defends profligacy, and calls
it the liberty of the emotions. We have had the sophist who defends
idleness, and calls it art. It will almost certainly happen--it can
almost certainly be prophesied--that in this saturnalia of sophistry
there will at some time or other arise a sophist who desires to idealise
cowardice. And when we are once in this unhealthy world of mere wild
words, what a vast deal there would be to say for cowardice! "Is not
life a lovely thing and worth saving?" the soldier would say as he ran
away. "Should I not prolong the exquisite miracle of consciousness?" the
householder would say as he hid under the table. "As long as there are
roses and lilies on the earth shall I not remain here?" would come the
voice of the citizen from under the bed. It would be quite as easy to
defend the coward as a kind of poet and mystic as it has been, in many
recent books, to defend the emotionalist as a kind of poet and mystic,
or the tyrant as a kind of poet and mystic. When that last grand
sophistry and morbidity is preached in a book or on a platform, you may
depend upon it there will be a great stir in its favour, that is, a
great stir among the little people who live among books and platforms.
There will be a new great Religion, the Religion of Methuselahism: with
pomps and priests and altars. Its devout crusaders will vow themselves
in thousands with a great vow to live long. But there is one comfort:
they won't.
For, indeed, the weakness of this worship of mere natural life (which
is a common enough creed to-day) is that it ignores the paradox of
courage and fails in its own aim. As a matter of fact, no men would be
killed quicker than the Methuselahites. The paradox of courage is that a
man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it. And
in the very case I have quoted we may see an example of how little the
theory of Methuselahism really inspires our best life. For there is one
riddle in that case which cannot easily be cleared up. If it was the
man's religion to live as long as he could, why on earth was he
enlisting as a soldier?
I Have received a letter from a gentleman who is very indignant at what
he considers my flippancy in disregarding or degrading Spiritualism. I
thought I was defending Spiritualism; but I am rather used to being
accused of mocking the thing that I set out to justify. My fate in most
controversies is rather pathetic. It is an almost invariable rule that
the man with whom I don't agree thinks I am making a fool of myself, and
the man with whom I do agree thinks I am making a fool of him. There
seems to be some sort of idea that you are not treating a subject
properly if you eulogise it with fantastic terms or defend it by
grotesque examples. Yet a truth is equally solemn whatever figure or
example its exponent adopts. It is an equally awful truth that four and
four make eight, whether you reckon the thing out in eight onions or
eight angels, or eight bricks or eight bishops, or eight minor poets or
eight pigs. Similarly, if it be true that God made all things, that
grave fact can be asserted by pointing at a star or by waving an
umbrella. But the case is stronger than this. There is a distinct
philosophical advantage in using grotesque terms in a serious
discussion.
I think seriously, on the whole, that the more serious is the discussion
the more grotesque should be the terms. For this, as I say, there is an
evident reason. For a subject is really solemn and important in so far
as it applies to the whole cosmos, or to some great spheres and cycles
of experience at least. So far as a thing is universal it is serious.
And so far as a thing is universal it is full of comic things. If you
take a small thing, it may be entirely serious: Napoleon, for instance,
was a small thing, and he was serious: the same applies to microbes. If
you isolate a thing, you may get the pure essence of gravity. But if you
take a large thing (such as the Solar System) it must be comic, at
least in parts. The germs are serious, because they kill you. But the
stars are funny, because they give birth to life, and life gives birth
to fun. If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only
prove it by talking about Plato and George Washington, your theory may
be a quite frivolous thing. But if you can prove it by talking about the
butler or the postman, then it is serious, because it is universal. So
far from it being irreverent to use silly metaphors on serious
questions, it is one's duty to use silly metaphors on serious questions.
It is the test of one's seriousness. It is the test of a responsible
religion or theory whether it can take examples from pots and pans and
boots and butter-tubs. It is the test of a good philosophy whether you
can defend it grotesquely. It is the test of a good religion whether you
can joke about it.
When I was a very young journalist I used to be irritated at a peculiar
habit of printers, a habit which most persons of a tendency similar to
mine have probably noticed also. It goes along with the fixed belief of
printers that to be a Rationalist is the same thing as to be a
Nationalist. I mean the printer's tendency to turn the word "cosmic"
into the word "comic." It annoyed me at the time. But since then I have
come to the conclusion that the printers were right. The democracy is
always right. Whatever is cosmic is comic.
Moreover, there is another reason that makes it almost inevitable that
we should defend grotesquely what we believe seriously. It is that all
grotesqueness is itself intimately related to seriousness. Unless a
thing is dignified, it cannot be undignified. Why is it funny that a man
should sit down suddenly in the street? There is only one possible or
intelligent reason: that man is the image of God. It is not funny that
anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. No one
sees anything funny in a tree falling down. No one sees a delicate
absurdity in a stone falling down. No man stops in the road and roars
with laughter at the sight of the snow coming down. The fall of
thunderbolts is treated with some gravity. The fall of roofs and high
buildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down that we
laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is
the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
The above, which occupies the great part of my article, is a
parenthises. It is time that I returned to my choleric correspondent who
rebuked me for being too frivolous about the problem of Spiritualism. My
correspondent, who is evidently an intelligent man, is very angry with
me indeed. He uses the strongest language. He says I remind him of a
brother of his: which seems to open an abyss or vista of infamy. The
main substance of his attack resolves itself into two propositions.
First, he asks me what right I have to talk about Spiritualism at all,
as I admit I have never been to a seance. This is all very well, but
there are a good many things to which I have never been, but I have not
the smallest intention of leaving off talking about them. I refuse (for
instance) to leave off talking about the Siege of Troy. I decline to be
mute in the matter of the French Revolution. I will not be silenced on
the late indefensible assassination of Julius Caesar. If nobody has any
right to judge of Spiritualism except a man who has been to a seance,
the results, logically speaking, are rather serious: it would almost
seem as if nobody had any right to judge of Christianity who had not
been to the first meeting at Pentecost. Which would be dreadful. I
conceive myself capable of forming my opinion of Spiritualism without
seeing spirits, just as I form my opinion of the Japanese War without
seeing the Japanese, or my opinion of American millionaires without
(thank God) seeing an American millionaire. Blessed are they who have
not seen and yet have believed: a passage which some have considered as
a prophecy of modern journalism.
But my correspondent's second objection is more important. He charges me
with actually ignoring the value of communication (if it exists) between
this world and the next. I do not ignore it. But I do say this--That a
different principle attaches to investigation in this spiritual field
from investigation in any other. If a man baits a line for fish, the
fish will come, even if he declares there are no such things as fishes.
If a man limes a twig for birds, the birds will be caught, even if he
thinks it superstitious to believe in birds at all. But a man cannot
bait a line for souls. A man cannot lime a twig to catch gods. All wise
schools have agreed that this latter capture depends to some extent on
the faith of the capturer. So it comes to this: If you have no faith in
the spirits your appeal is in vain; and if you have--is it needed? If
you do not believe, you cannot. If you do--you will not.
That is the real distinction between investigation in this department
and investigation in any other. The priest calls to the goddess, for the
same reason that a man calls to his wife, because he knows she is there.
If a man kept on shouting out very loud the single word "Maria," merely
with the object of discovering whether if he did it long enough some
woman of that name would come and marry him, he would be more or less in
the position of the modern spiritualist. The old religionist cried out
for his God. The new religionist cries out for some god to be his. The
whole point of religion as it has hitherto existed in the world was that
you knew all about your gods, even before you saw them, if indeed you
ever did. Spiritualism seems to me absolutely right on all its mystical
side. The supernatural part of it seems to me quite natural. The
incredible part of it seems to me obviously true. But I think it so far
dangerous or unsatisfactory that it is in some degree scientific. It
inquires whether its gods are worth inquiring into. A man (of a certain
age) may look into the eyes of his lady-love to see that they are
beautiful. But no normal lady will allow that young man to look into her
eyes to see whether they are beautiful. The same vanity and idiosyncrasy
has been generally observed in gods. Praise them; or leave them alone;
but do not look for them unless you know they are there. Do not look for
them unless you want them. It annoys them very much.
The refusal of the jurors in the Thaw trial to come to an agreement is
certainly a somewhat amusing sequel to the frenzied and even fantastic
caution with which they were selected. Jurymen were set aside for
reasons which seem to have only the very wildest relation to the
case--reasons which we cannot conceive as giving any human being a real
bias. It may be questioned whether the exaggerated theory of
impartiality in an arbiter or juryman may not be carried so far as to be
more unjust than partiality itself. What people call impartiality may
simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply
mean mental activity. It is sometimes made an objection, for instance,
to a juror that he has formed some prima-facie opinion upon a case: if
he can be forced under sharp questioning to admit that he has formed
such an opinion, he is regarded as manifestly unfit to conduct the
inquiry. Surely this is unsound. If his bias is one of interest, of
class, or creed, or notorious propaganda, then that fact certainly
proves that he is not an impartial arbiter. But the mere fact that he
did form some temporary impression from the first facts as far as he
knew them--this does not prove that he is not an impartial arbiter--it
only proves that he is not a cold-blooded fool.
If we walk down the street, taking all the jurymen who have not formed
opinions and leaving all the jurymen who have formed opinions, it seems
highly probable that we shall only succeed in taking all the stupid
jurymen and leaving all the thoughtful ones. Provided that the opinion
formed is really of this airy and abstract kind, provided that it has no
suggestion of settled motive or prejudice, we might well regard it not
merely as a promise of capacity, but literally as a promise of justice.
The man who took the trouble to deduce from the police reports would
probably be the man who would take the trouble to deduce further and
different things from the evidence. The man who had the sense to form an
opinion would be the man who would have the sense to alter it.
It is worth while to dwell for a moment on this minor aspect of the
matter because the error about impartiality and justice is by no means
confined to a criminal question. In much more serious matters it is
assumed that the agnostic is impartial; whereas the agnostic is merely
ignorant. The logical outcome of the fastidiousness about the Thaw
jurors would be that the case ought to be tried by Esquimaux, or
Hottentots, or savages from the Cannibal Islands--by some class of
people who could have no conceivable interest in the parties, and
moreover, no conceivable interest in the case. The pure and starry
perfection of impartiality would be reached by people who not only had
no opinion before they had heard the case, but who also had no opinion
after they had heard it. In the same way, there is in modern discussions
of religion and philosophy an absurd assumption that a man is in some
way just and well-poised because he has come to no conclusion; and that
a man is in some way knocked off the list of fair judges because he has
come to a conclusion. It is assumed that the sceptic has no bias;
whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of scepticism. I remember
once arguing with an honest young atheist, who was very much shocked at
my disputing some of the assumptions which were absolute sanctities to
him (such as the quite unproved proposition of the independence of
matter and the quite improbable proposition of its power to originate
mind), and he at length fell back upon this question, which he delivered
with an honourable heat of defiance and indignation: "Well, can you tell
me any man of intellect, great in science or philosophy, who accepted
the miraculous?" I said, "With pleasure. Descartes, Dr. Johnson, Newton,
Faraday, Newman, Gladstone, Pasteur, Browning, Brunetiere--as many more
as you please." To which that quite admirable and idealistic young man
made this astonishing reply--"Oh, but of course they had to say that;
they were Christians." First he challenged me to find a black swan, and
then he ruled out all my swans because they were black. The fact that
all these great intellects had come to the Christian view was somehow or
other a proof either that they were not great intellects or that they
had not really come to that view. The argument thus stood in a
charmingly convenient form: "All men that count have come to my
conclusion; for if they come to your conclusion they do not count."
It did not seem to occur to such controversialists that if Cardinal
Newman was really a man of intellect, the fact that he adhered to
dogmatic religion proved exactly as much as the fact that Professor
Huxley, another man of intellect, found that he could not adhere to
dogmatic religion; that is to say (as I cheerfully admit), it proved
precious little either way. If there is one class of men whom history
has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all
directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men. I would always
prefer to go by the bulk of humanity; that is why I am a democrat. But
whatever be the truth about exceptional intelligence and the masses, it
is manifestly most unreasonable that intelligent men should be divided
upon the absurd modern principle of regarding every clever man who
cannot make up his mind as an impartial judge, and regarding every
clever man who can make up his mind as a servile fanatic. As it is, we
seem to regard it as a positive objection to a reasoner that he has
taken one side or the other. We regard it (in other words) as a positive
objection to a reasoner that he has contrived to reach the object of his
reasoning. We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a
thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end. We say that
the juryman is not a juryman because he has brought in a verdict. We say
that the judge is not a judge because he gives judgment. We say that the
sincere believer has no right to vote, simply because he has voted.
A correspondent asks me to make more lucid my remarks about phonetic
spelling. I have no detailed objection to items of spelling-reform; my
objection is to a general principle; and it is this. It seems to me that
what is really wrong with all modern and highly civilised language is
that it does so largely consist of dead words. Half our speech consists
of similes that remind us of no similarity; of pictorial phrases that
call up no picture; of historical allusions the origin of which we have
forgotten. Take any instance on which the eye happens to alight. I saw
in the paper some days ago that the well-known leader of a certain
religious party wrote to a supporter of his the following curious words:
"I have not forgotten the talented way in which you held up the banner
at Birkenhead." Taking the ordinary vague meaning of the word
"talented," there is no coherency in the picture. The trumpets blow, the
spears shake and glitter, and in the thick of the purple battle there
stands a gentleman holding up a banner in a talented way. And when we
come to the original force of the word "talent" the matter is worse: a
talent is a Greek coin used in the New Testament as a symbol of the
mental capital committed to an individual at birth. If the religious
leader in question had really meant anything by his phrases, he would
have been puzzled to know how a man could use a Greek coin to hold up a
banner. But really he meant nothing by his phrases. "Holding up the
banner" was to him a colourless term for doing the proper thing, and
"talented" was a colourless term for doing it successfully.
Now my own fear touching anything in the way of phonetic spelling is
that it would simply increase this tendency to use words as counters and
not as coins. The original life in a word (as in the word "talent")
burns low as it is: sensible spelling might extinguish it altogether.
Suppose any sentence you like: suppose a man says, "Republics generally
encourage holidays." It looks like the top line of a copy-book. Now, it
is perfectly true that if you wrote that sentence exactly as it is
pronounced, even by highly educated people, the sentence would run:
"Ripubliks jenrally inkurrij hollidies." It looks ugly: but I have not
the smallest objection to ugliness. My objection is that these four
words have each a history and hidden treasures in them: that this
history and hidden treasure (which we tend to forget too much as it is)
phonetic spelling tends to make us forget altogether. Republic does not
mean merely a mode of political choice. Republic (as we see when we look
at the structure of the word) means the Public Thing: the abstraction
which is us all.
A Republican is not a man who wants a Constitution with a President. A
Republican is a man who prefers to think of Government as impersonal; he
is opposed to the Royalist, who prefers to think of Government as
personal. Take the second word, "generally." This is always used as
meaning "in the majority of cases." But, again, if we look at the shape
and spelling of the word, we shall see that "generally" means something
more like "generically," and is akin to such words as "generation" or
"regenerate." "Pigs are generally dirty" does not mean that pigs are, in
the majority of cases, dirty, but that pigs as a race or genus are
dirty, that pigs as pigs are dirty--an important philosophical
distinction. Take the third word, "encourage." The word "encourage" is
used in such modern sentences in the merely automatic sense of promote;
to encourage poetry means merely to advance or assist poetry. But to
encourage poetry means properly to put courage into poetry--a fine idea.
Take the fourth word, "holidays." As long as that word remains, it will
always answer the ignorant slander which asserts that religion was
opposed to human cheerfulness; that word will always assert that when a
day is holy it should also be happy. Properly spelt, these words all
tell a sublime story, like Westminster Abbey. Phonetically spelt, they
might lose the last traces of any such story. "Generally" is an exalted
metaphysical term; "jenrally" is not. If you "encourage" a man, you pour
into him the chivalry of a hundred princes; this does not happen if you
merely "inkurrij" him. "Republics," if spelt phonetically, might
actually forget to be public. "Holidays," if spelt phonetically, might
actually forget to be holy.
Here is a case that has just occurred. A certain magistrate told
somebody whom he was examining in court that he or she "should always be
polite to the police." I do not know whether the magistrate noticed the
circumstance, but the word "polite" and the word "police" have the same
origin and meaning. Politeness means the atmosphere and ritual of the
city, the symbol of human civilisation. The policeman means the
representative and guardian of the city, the symbol of human
civilisation. Yet it may be doubted whether the two ideas are commonly
connected in the mind. It is probable that we often hear of politeness
without thinking of a policeman; it is even possible that our eyes often
alight upon a policeman without our thoughts instantly flying to the
subject of politeness. Yet the idea of the sacred city is not only the
link of them both, it is the only serious justification and the only
serious corrective of them both. If politeness means too often a mere
frippery, it is because it has not enough to do with serious patriotism
and public dignity; if policemen are coarse or casual, it is because
they are not sufficiently convinced that they are the servants of the
beautiful city and the agents of sweetness and light. Politeness is not
really a frippery. Politeness is not really even a thing merely suave
and deprecating. Politeness is an armed guard, stern and splendid and
vigilant, watching over all the ways of men; in other words, politeness
is a policeman. A policeman is not merely a heavy man with a truncheon:
a policeman is a machine for the smoothing and sweetening of the
accidents of everyday existence. In other words, a policeman is
politeness; a veiled image of politeness--sometimes impenetrably veiled.
But my point is here that by losing the original idea of the city, which
is the force and youth of both the words, both the things actually
degenerate. Our politeness loses all manliness because we forget that
politeness is only the Greek for patriotism. Our policemen lose all
delicacy because we forget that a policeman is only the Greek for
something civilised. A policeman should often have the functions of a
knight-errant. A policeman should always have the elegance of a
knight-errant. But I am not sure that he would succeed any the better n
remembering this obligation of romantic grace if his name were spelt
phonetically, supposing that it could be spelt phonetically. Some
spelling-reformers, I am told, in the poorer parts of London do spell
his name phonetically, very phonetically. They call him a "pleeceman."
Thus the whole romance of the ancient city disappears from the word, and
the policeman's reverent courtesy of demeanour deserts him quite
suddenly. This does seem to me the case against any extreme revolution
in spelling. If you spell a word wrong you have some temptation to think
it wrong.
Somebody writes complaining of something I said about progress. I have
forgotten what I said, but I am quite certain that it was (like a
certain Mr. Douglas in a poem which I have also forgotten) tender and
true. In any case, what I say now is this. Human history is so rich and
complicated that you can make out a case for any course of improvement
or retrogression. I could make out that the world has been growing more
democratic, for the English franchise has certainly grown more
democratic. I could also make out that the world has been growing more
aristocratic, for the English Public Schools have certainly grown more
aristocratic I could prove the decline of militarism by the decline of
flogging; I could prove the increase of militarism by the increase of
standing armies and conscription. But I can prove anything in this way.
I can prove that the world has always been growing greener. Only lately
men have invented absinthe and the Westminster Gazette. I could prove
the world has grown less green. There are no more Robin Hood foresters,
and fields are being covered with houses. I could show that the world
was less red with khaki or more red with the new penny stamps. But in
all cases progress means progress only in some particular thing. Have
you ever noticed that strange line of Tennyson, in which he confesses,
half consciously, how very conventional progress is?--
"Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing
grooves of change."
Even in praising change, he takes for a simile the most unchanging
thing. He calls our modern change a groove. And it is a groove; perhaps
there was never anything so groovy.
Nothing would induce me in so idle a monologue as this to discuss
adequately a great political matter like the question of the military
punishments in Egypt. But I may suggest one broad reality to be observed
by both sides, and which is, generally speaking, observed by neither.
Whatever else is right, it is utterly wrong to employ the argument that
we Europeans must do to savages and Asiatics whatever savages and
Asiatics do to us. I have even seen some controversialists use the
metaphor, "We must fight them with their own weapons." Very well; let
those controversialists take their metaphor, and take it literally. Let
us fight the Soudanese with their own weapons. Their own weapons are
large, very clumsy knives, with an occasional old-fashioned gun. Their
own weapons are also torture and slavery. If we fight them with torture
and slavery, we shall be fighting badly, precisely as if we fought them
with clumsy knives and old guns. That is the whole strength of our
Christian civilisation, that it does fight with its own weapons and not
with other people's. It is not true that superiority suggests a tit for
tat. It is not true that if a small hooligan puts his tongue out at the
Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Justice immediately realises that his
only chance of maintaining his position is to put his tongue out at the
little hooligan. The hooligan may or may not have any respect at all for
the Lord Chief Justice: that is a matter which we may contentedly leave
as a solemn psychological mystery. But if the hooligan has any respect
at all for the Lord Chief Justice, that respect is certainly extended to
the Lord Chief Justice entirely because he does not put his tongue out.
Exactly in the same way the ruder or more sluggish races regard the
civilisation of Christendom. If they have any respect for it, it is
precisely because it does not use their own coarse and cruel expedients.
According to some modern moralists whenever Zulus cut off the heads of
dead Englishmen, Englishmen must cut off the heads of dead Zulus.
Whenever Arabs or Egyptians constantly use the whip to their slaves,
Englishmen must use the whip to their subjects. And on a similar
principle (I suppose), whenever an English Admiral has to fight
cannibals the English Admiral ought to eat them. However unattractive a
menu consisting entirely of barbaric kings may appear to an English
gentleman, he must try to sit down to it with an appetite. He must fight
the Sandwich Islanders with their own weapons; and their own weapons are
knives and forks. But the truth of the matter is, of course, that to do
this kind of thing is to break the whole spell of our supremacy. All the
mystery of the white man, all the fearful poetry of the white man, so
far as it exists in the eyes of these savages, consists in the fact that
we do not do such things. The Zulus point at us and say, "Observe the
advent of these inexplicable demi-gods, these magicians, who do not cut
off the noses of their enemies." The Soudanese say to each other, "This
hardy people never flogs its servants; it is superior to the simplest
and most obvious human pleasures." And the cannibals say, "The austere
and terrible race, the race that denies itself even boiled missionary,
is upon us: let us flee."
Whether or no these details are a little conjectural, the general
proposition I suggest is the plainest common sense. The elements that
make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilisation are
precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. For
the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same
as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination. It is
imagination that makes a man outwit his enemy, and it is imagination
that makes him spare his enemy. It is precisely because this picturing
of the other man's point of view is in the main a thing in which
Christians and Europeans specialise that Christians and Europeans, with
all their faults, have carried to such perfection both the arts of peace
and war.
They alone have invented machine-guns, and they alone have invented
ambulances; they have invented ambulances (strange as it may sound) for
the same reason for which they have invented machine-guns. Both involve
a vivid calculation of remote events. It is precisely because the East,
with all its wisdom, is cruel, that the East, with all its wisdom, is
weak. And it is precisely because savages are pitiless that they are
still--merely savages. If they could imagine their enemy's sufferings
they could also imagine his tactics. If Zulus did not cut off the
Englishman's head they might really borrow it. For if you do not
understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him,
very probably you will not.
When I was about seven years old I used to think that the chief modern
danger was a danger of over-civilisation. I am inclined to think now
that the chief modern danger is that of a slow return towards barbarism,
just such a return towards barbarism as is indicated in the suggestions
of barbaric retaliation of which I have just spoken. Civilisation in the
best sense merely means the full authority of the human spirit over all
externals. Barbarism means the worship of those externals in their crude
and unconquered state. Barbarism means the worship of Nature; and in
recent poetry, science, and philosophy there has been too much of the
worship of Nature. Wherever men begin to talk much and with great
solemnity about the forces outside man, the note of it is barbaric.
When men talk much about heredity and environment they are almost
barbarians. The modern men of science are many of them almost
barbarians. Mr. Blatchford is in great danger of becoming a barbarian.
For barbarians (especially the truly squalid and unhappy barbarians) are
always talking about these scientific subjects from morning till night.
That is why they remain squalid and unhappy; that is why they remain
barbarians. Hottentots are always talking about heredity, like Mr.
Blatchford. Sandwich Islanders are always talking about environment,
like Mr. Suthers. Savages--those that are truly stunted or
depraved--dedicate nearly all their tales and sayings to the subject of
physical kinship, of a curse on this or that tribe, of a taint in this
or that family, of the invincible law of blood, of the unavoidable evil
of places. The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what
he must do; the true civilised man is a free man and is always talking
about what he may do. Hence all the Zola heredity and Ibsen heredity
that has been written in our time affects me as not merely evil, but as
essentially ignorant and retrogressive. This sort of science is almost
the only thing that can with strict propriety be called reactionary.
Scientific determinism is simply the primal twilight of all mankind; and
some men seem to be returning to it.
Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about
material substances instead of about ideas. The old civilisation talked
about the sin of gluttony or excess. We talk about the Problem of
Drink--as if drink could be a problem. When people have come to call the
problem of human intemperance the Problem of Drink, and to talk about
curing it by attacking the drink traffic, they have reached quite a dim
stage of barbarism. The thing is an inverted form of fetish worship; it
is no sillier to say that a bottle is a god than to say that a bottle is
a devil. The people who talk about the curse of drink will probably
progress down that dark hill. In a little while we shall have them
calling the practice of wife-beating the Problem of Pokers; the habit of
housebreaking will be called the Problem of the Skeleton-Key Trade; and
for all I know they may try to prevent forgery by shutting up all the
stationers' shops by Act of Parliament.
I cannot help thinking that there is some shadow of this uncivilised
materialism lying at present upon a much more dignified and valuable
cause. Every one is talking just now about the desirability of
ingeminating peace and averting war. But even war and peace are physical
states rather than moral states, and in talking about them only we have
by no means got to the bottom of the matter. How, for instance, do we as
a matter of fact create peace in one single community? We do not do it
by vaguely telling every one to avoid fighting and to submit to anything
that is done to him. We do it by definitely defining his rights and then
undertaking to avenge his wrongs. We shall never have a common peace in
Europe till we have a common principle in Europe. People talk of "The
United States of Europe;" but they forget that it needed the very
doctrinal "Declaration of Independence" to make the United States of
America. You cannot agree about nothing any more than you can quarrel
about nothing.
CHESTERTON-ALL THING CONSIDERED - SCIENCE AND RELIGION