[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
be connected. It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily
forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it. Thus when Mr.
Wells says (as he did somewhere), All chairs are quite different, he utters not merely a
misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could
not call them all chairs.
Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the
test instead of trying to pass the test. We often hear it said, for instance, What is right in
one age is wrong in another. This is quite reasonable, if it means that there is a fixed
aim, and that certain methods attain at certain times and not at other times. If women,
say, desire to be elegant, it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter
and at another time by growing thinner. But you cannot say that they are improved by
ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish to be oblong. If the standard
changes, how can there be improvement, which implies a standard? Nietzsche started a
nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so,
we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake
Jones if you walk in the other direction? You cannot discuss whether one people has
succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be
like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig is fat.
It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But
as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to
estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not
begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress. It is worth
remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed
the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests
an imprisoned tedium. He wrote --
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is. Change is about
the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into.
The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the
standard is one of the things that make thought about the past or future simply
impossible. The theory of a complete change of standards in human history does not
merely deprive us of the pleasure of honouring our fathers; it deprives us even of the
more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.
This bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our time would not be
complete without some reference to pragmatism; for though I have here used and
should everywhere defend the pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth, there
is an extreme application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever. My
meaning can be put shortly thus. I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective
truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that
are necessary to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a
belief in objective truth. The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and
never mind the Absolute. But precisely one of the things that he must think is the
Absolute. This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is a matter
of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a
pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully
attacks. The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be a human being)
makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice. The pragmatist, who professes
to be specially human, makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact.
To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic current
philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania. The mere
questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it.
This is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts of the
advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought. What we are looking at is not
the boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. It
is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild
scepticism runs its course. It has run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of
the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen it
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]