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Page 13
Lest this should be called loose assertion, it is perhaps desirable,
though dull, to run rapidly through the chief modern fashions
of thought which have this effect of stopping thought itself.
Materialism and the view of everything as a personal illusion
have some such effect; for if the mind is mechanical,
thought cannot be very exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal,
there is nothing to think about. But in these cases the effect
is indirect and doubtful. In some cases it is direct and clear;
notably in the case of what is generally called evolution.
Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which,
if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either
an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things
came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack
upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not
destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that
a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive
thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox;
for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly,
especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.
But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such
thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him
to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing.
At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything
and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon
the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.
You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought.
Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist
reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I
cannot think."
Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by
Mr. H.G.Wells when he insists that every separate thing is "unique,"
and there are no categories at all. This also is merely destructive.
Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot 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.
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