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Page 12
But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place.
Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled
upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.
A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about
the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part
of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not
to assert--himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he
ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility
content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble
that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we
had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time.
The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time;
but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility
than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was
a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot
that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man
doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder.
But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make
him stop working altogether.
At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic
and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one
comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not
be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one,
or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race
of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity
as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too
proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced.
The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek
even to claim their inheritance. It is exactly this intellectual
helplessness which is our second problem.
The last chapter has been concerned only with a fact of observation:
that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from
his reason than his imagination. It was not meant to attack the
authority of reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it.
For it needs defence. The whole modern world is at war with reason;
and the tower already reels.
The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle
of religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they
cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle.
They are like children so stupid as to notice nothing paradoxical
in the playful assertion that a door is not a door. The modern
latitudinarians speak, for instance, about authority in religion
not only as if there were no reason in it, but as if there had never
been any reason for it. Apart from seeing its philosophical basis,
they cannot even see its historical cause. Religious authority
has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as
every legal system (and especially our present one) has been
callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack
the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious
authority are like men who should attack the police without ever
having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril
to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it
religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier.
And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier,
if our race is to avoid ruin.
That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself.
Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next
generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one
set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching
the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith.
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert
that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are
merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question,
"Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction?
Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic?
They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"
The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself."
But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right
to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."
There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought
that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which
all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of
decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H.G.Wells has raised its
ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called
"Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself,
and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions,
past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin
that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked
and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the
horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said,
for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult
defence of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once
things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first.
The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define
the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark
defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable,
more supernatural than all--the authority of a man to think.
We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it.
For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities,
and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne.
In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both
of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods
of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of
destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed
the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum.
With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre
off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.
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