The Sword of Song

NOTES 65 even what we mean when we say so; but the limits of knowledge, slowly receding, yet never so far as to permit us to unveil the awful and impenetrable adytum of consciousness, or that of matter, must one day be suddenly widened by the forging of a new weapon. Huxley and Tyndall have prophesied this before I w as born; sometimes in vague language, once or twice clearly enough; to me it is a source of the utmost concern that their successors should not always see eye to eye with them in this respect. Professor Ray Lankester, in crushing the unhappy theists of the recent Times contro- versy, does not hesitate to say that Science can never throw any light on certain mysteries. Even the theist is j ustified in retorting that Science, if this be so, may as w ell be dis- carded ; for these are problems which must ever intrude upon the human mind—upon the mind of the scientist most of all. To dismiss them by an act of w ill is at once heroic and puerile : courage is as necessary to progress as any quality that w e possess ; and as courage is in either case required, the courage of ignorance ( necessarily sterile, though wanted badly enough when our garden was choked by theological weeds) is less desirable than the courage which embarks on the always desperate philosophical problem. Time and again, in the history of Science, a period has arrived when, gorged with facts, she has sunk into a lethargy of reflection accompanied by appalling nightmares in the shape of impossible theories. Such a night- mare now rides us ; once again philosophy has said its last word, and arrived at a dead- lock. Aristotle, in reducing to the fundamental contradictions-in-terms which they involve the figments of the Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, the Platonists, the Pyrrhonists ; Kant, in his reductio ad absurdam of the Thomists, the Scotists, the Wolffians,—all the warring brood, alike only in the inability to reconcile the ultimate antimonies of a cosmogony only grosser for its pinchbeck spirituality ; have, I take it, found their modern parallel in the ghastly laughter of Herbert Spencer, as fleshed upon the corpses of Berkeley and the Idealists from Fichte and H artman to Lotze and Tren- delenburg he drives the reeking fangs of his im- agination into the palpitating vitals of his own grim masterpiece of reconcilement, self-deluded and yet self-conscious of its own delusion. History affirms that such a deadlock is invariably the prelude to a new enlightenment: by such steps we have advanced, by such we shall advance. The “horror of great darkness” which is scepticism must ever be broken by some heroic master-soul, intolerant of the cosmic agony. We then await his dawn. May I go one step further, and lift up my voice and prophesy? I would indicate the direction in which this darkness must break. Evolutionists will remember that nature cannot rest. Nor can society. Still less the brain of man. “ Audax omnia perpeti Gens human ruit per vetitum nefas.”* We have destroyed the meaning of vetitum nefas and are in no fear of an imaginary cohort of ills and terrors. H aving perfected one weapon, reason, and found it destructive to all falsehood, we have been (some of us) a little apt to go out to fight with no other weapon. “FitzJames’s blade was sword and shield, ”† and that served him against the murderous bludgeon-sword of the ruffianly Highlander he happened to meet; but he w ould have fared ill had he called a Western Sheriff a liar, or gone off Boer-sticking on Spion Kop. Reason has done its utmost; theory has glutted us, and the motion of the ship is a little trying; mixed metaphore—excellent in a short essay like this—is no panacea for all mental infirmities; we must seek another guide. A ll the facts science has so busily collected, varied as they seem to be, are in reality all of the same kind. If we are to have one salient fact, a fact for a real advance, it must be a fact of a different order. Have we such a fact to hand? We have. First, what do we mean by a fact of a different order? Let me take and example; the most impossible being the best for our purpose. The Spiritualists, let us suppose, go mad and begin to talk sense. (I can only imagine that such would be the result. ) All their “facts” are proved. We prove a world of spirits, the existence of G od, the immortality of the soul, etc. But, with all that, we are not really one step advanced into the heart of the inquiry which lies at the heart of philosophy, “What is anything?” I see a cat. Dr. Johnson says it is a cat. Berkeley says it is a group of sensations. Cankaracharya says it is an illusion, an incarnation, or God, according to the hat he has got on, and is talking through. Spencer says it is a mode of the Unknow- able. But none of them seriously doubt the fact that I exist; that a cat exists; that one sees the other, All—bar Johnson—hint—but oh! how dimly!—at what I now know to be— true?— no, not necesarily true, but nearer the truth. Huxley goes deeper in his demolition of Des- cartes. With him, “I see a cat,” proves “some- * Horace, Odes, I. 3. † Scott, The Lady of the Lake.