ALLEN UPWARD OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO THE NEW WORD Some Press Notices of the First (Anonymous) Edition Mr. William Archer, in The Morning Leader: " As I turn over the leaves and re-read the passages I have marked, I utterly despair of conveying within my appointed limits, any inkling of the author's fertility of thought and illustration. Our new Socratic is unquestionably an admir- able writer." Mr. G. R. S. Mead, in leading article in The Theosophical Review : *' It is one of the most stimulating books we have come across for a long time. The insight and wit with which this inquiry is carried out are remarkable as a deep-going criticism of modern science and philosophy, and must be carefully studied in the original to be fully appreciated. This is so delightful a writer that we could go on quoting him with pleasure for pages. He is a shatterer of idols, not for the pleasure of iconoclasm, but for love of the living God. No better present can be given to an inquiring friend than this thought-compelling and illuminating book." THE NEW WORD BY ALLEN UPWARD CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE PARNASSUS PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY, ATHENS " Never change native Names ; For there are Name's in every nation, God-given, Of unexplained power in the Mysteries." Cbiildtean Oracle. NEW EDITION LONDON A. C. FIFIELD, 44 FLEET STREET, E,C. 1908 An Open Letter addressed to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, on the meaning of the word IDEALIST. Note to Second Edition WHEN, after years of waiting, this little book first struggled forth in the city of Geneva, under the fostering care of Professor Roget of that University, without an author's name, and wearing an outlandish garb, I could not foresee that a work so handicapped, and from its nature so calculated to daunt the vulgar mind, would so soon find a public. That it has done so is due to the generous welcome given it by Mr. William Archer and Mr. G. B. S. Mead, to whom I am now privileged to return my grateful thanks. At the same time, courage such as they have shown is so rare, and the fear of those Inquisitors of Science, the specialists, is still so widespread, that there must be many readers who will accompany me in my cir- cumnavigation of hope with inward misgivings, unless they be assured beforehand that I have not, as Bacon was charged with doing, "written of science like a lord chancellor." For their sake I am encouraged to note that where the archbishops of science have spoken, so far, they have spoken in blessing. The Nobel Prize for Physical 6 Note to Second Edition Research has now been awarded to Professor Thomson for a new theory of Matter which harmonises with my own language to the point of verbal coincidence. Professor Ostwald of Leipzig, in some respects the most eminent physical chemist of Europe, has re- pudiated the Kinetic Molecular Theory, on his own grounds, not less vigorously than I have done on mine. The use of Euclid as a text-book of geometry is being widely abandoned on the continent of Europe. Most gratifying of all, so distinguished a biologist as Pro- fessor Patrick Geddes has been kind enough to write in very generous terms of my trespass in his domain, and especially of the suggested word Metastrophe. Nevertheless, a book which is a plea for reason against authority must not take shelter behind authority. From the judgments of the greatest judges of to-day an appeal lies to the future, and to the unfettered mind, and to undying verihood. A. U. Heads Page 1. The Riddle . ... 9 2. Psychology : The Personal Equation . . 27 3. Etymology : The Castle in the Air . . 45 4. Lexicography : The Play upon Words . . 60 5. Metaphysics : The House of Cards . . 74 6. Altruism : The Face in the Looking-Glass . 85 7. Materialism': The Shape . . . loo 8. Physics: The Knot . . . .114 9. Dynamics: The Demon in the Stone . . 122 10. Chemistry: The Man in the Crumb . .137 11. Mathematics: The Conjuring Trick . . 151 12. Logic : The Cipher . ... 163 13. Ontology : The End . . . . 174 14. Metastrophe : The Magic Crystal . . 1 88 15. Biology: The Elf fr. . . . 202 1 6. Theology: The Painted Window . .220 17. Exegetics : The Forbidden Fruit . .239 1 8. Pathology: The Pyramid . . . 256 19. Astrology: The Eclipse . . . 275 20. Ethics : The Book of Etiquette . .291 21. The Heir . . ... 310 FIRST HEAD The New Word THE RIDDLE The Nobel Prize. i. Philanthropy and Bar abbas. 2. Charity and Genius. 3. " Idealistic." 4. Eleven Guesses. 5. Prize for a New Religion. 6. Challenge to Materialism ? 7. The Academy and the Idealist. 8. The Bequest in Abeyance. A LFRED BERNHARD NOBEL, maker of dyna- Jr\. mite, died in the year 1896, and by his will gave the bulk of his great wealth to benefit mankind, by these remarkable provisions : " With the residue of my convertible estate I hereby direct my Executors to proceed as follows : They shall convert my said residue of property into money, which they shall then invest in safe securities ; the capital thus secured shall constitute a fund, the in- terest accruing from which shall be annually awarded in prizes to those persons who shall have contributed most materially to benefit mankind during the year im- mediately preceding. " The said interest shall be divided into five equal amounts to be apportioned as follows : io The New Word " One share to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention in the domain of Physics ; " One share to the person who shall have made the most important Chemical discovery or improve- ment ; " One share to the person who shall have made the most important discovery in the domain of Phy- siology or Medicine ; " One share to the person who shall have produced in the field of Literature the most distinguished work of an idealist tendency ; " And finally, one share to the person who shall have most or best promoted the Fraternity of Nations and the Abolition or Diminution of Standing Armies and the Formation and Increase of Peace Congresses. " The prizes for Physics and Chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Science in Stockholm ; the one for Physiology or Medicine by the Caroline Medical Institute in Stockholm ; the prize for Literature by the Academy in Stockholm, and that for Peace by a Committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storthing. " I declare it to be my express desire that in the awarding of prizes no consideration whatever be paid to the nationality of the candidates, that is to say, that the most deserving be awarded the prize, whether of Scandinavian origin or not." The Riddle n The more attentively we study these provisions the more we shall be struck by their profound origin- ality and insight. To begin with, the hereditary objects of charity are the sad leavings of mankind The poor, whose broken lives Lie underneath great empires' pageantry Like rubble underneath rich palace walls. Nobel is the first philanthropist who has desired to benefit the forerunners of the race, as well as the laggards, and who has seen that in benefiting them he would benefit all the rest. In reality there are two kinds of outcasts. Man, in his march upward out of the deep into the light, throws out a vanguard and a rearguard, and both are out of step with the main body. Humanity con- demns equally those who are too good for it, and those who are too bad. On its Procrustean bed the stunted members of the race are racked ; the giants are cut down. It puts to death with the same ruthless equality the prophet and the atavist. The poet and the drunkard starve side by side. Of these two classes of victims the stragglers are not more in need than the forlorn hope ; but the am- bulance has always waited in the rear. It would seem as though the vanity of benevolence were soothed 12 The New Word by the sight of infirmity, but affronted by that of genius. Even the loafer and the criminal have found friends. The thinker and the discoverer have been left to the struggle for existence. For them are no asylums, for them no societies stand ready to offer help. Millions have been spent in providing libraries for the populace ; the founder of German literature was refused a librarian's place. And so philanthropy has cast its vote to this day for Barabbas. Nobel alone has had the courage not to be afraid of genius, and the wisdom to see that whatever is conferred on it really is conferred on all mankind. The third of these bequests may serve to illustrate the superiority of Nobel's method. Many benefactors have desired to relieve bodily suffering. But they have discerned no way of doing this except by building a hospital for the advantage of a limited class. Nobel's aim has been at once wider and higher. He has sought to relieve all suffer- ing. He has demanded worldwide remedies ; he has offered rewards for the abolition of disease. And in doing so he has at the same time remedied a great injustice, by endowing medical discovery. The mechanical inventor has long had it in his power to acquire wealth by the sale of his idea. Nobel's own fortune owed its rise to a patented invention. But the noble etiquette of the healer's calling volunt- arily renounces this advantage lest it should hinder the relief of human pain. In medicine every advance made by one is placed freely at the service of all. For such saviours of humanity there has been hitherto no material recompense, and humanity has been con- The Riddle 13 tent that it should be so. Neither parliaments nor emperors have ever wished that the healers of men should take rank with their destroyers, and that a Pasteur should receive the rewards of a Krupp. Nobel willed otherwise. The fifth bequest contains a yet more striking instance of that refined and beautiful inspiration which distinguishes the Testament of Nobel. This is a bequest for practical work on behalf of peace, disarmament and the fraternity of nations. At the time when Nobel drew up his will these aspira- tions seemed to have no more active enemies than the Norwegian people. That nation was seeking separation from Sweden, and seeking it in that tem- per of hatred which unhappily accompanies such movements almost everywhere. The Norwegian Storthing was building fortresses on the Swedish frontier, and providing battleships. Every Nor- wegian boy was being trained with a view to an armed struggle with the Swedes, and taught to regard them with revengeful feelings, as American children were long taught to regard the English. Nobel was a Swede who loved his country, and he has placed the administration of his other bequests in Swedish hands. He entrusted the endowment of peace and brotherhood to the Norwegian Storthing. Surely no more magnanimous appeal than this has ever been addressed by a man to men. The direc- tions of such a Testator ought not to be regarded lightly. They begin to assume the character of a sacred text. 14 The New Word ii What was the wish in Nobel's mind when, in lan- guage destined to immortality, he drew up the Fourth Bequest ? " One share to the person who shall have produced in the field of Literature the most remarkable work of an idealistic tendency ? " There is hardly any class which gives so much to humanity, and receives so little in return, as the class of men of letters. There is hardly any class whose sufferings are greater ; and there is none which philanthropy has done so little to relieve. The works of Homer have been an unfailing spring of noble pleasure for three thousand years, and during all that time humanity has repeated with more com- placency than shame the story of the poet begging his bread, and has warned its children to shun the literary career. The dreadful death of Chatterton seems never to have roused a momentary pity in any philanthropist. Had that boy been blind, or dumb, or idiotic, or incurably diseased, how many benevolent hearts would have yearned over him ! How many luxurious homes, standing in stately gardens amid glorious scenery, would have opened their doors to take him in ! On his behalf the preachers would have preached, and the purse-proud would have loosed their purse-strings. But because, instead of The Riddle 15 being blind, he saw too well, saw the beauty and the wonder of the world, and would have told of them, philanthropy turned its back on him, and humanity would not suffer him to live. Poe, himself the most gifted and the most wretched of his kind, has declared that the laudation of the unworthy is to the worthy the bitterest of all wrong. But what, then, of the rewards of the unworthy ? and the rewards of literature are too often in inverse ratio to its worth. The author of a successful farce destined to three or four years' life could afford to look down on the Nobel prize. The writer who faith- fully reflects every prejudice in the public mind can never stand in need of charity. But what of Dante and Milton, of Villon and Verlaine ? The man of genius, above all the man of original genius, must generally look for bread to some other pursuit than his own. The exceptions are those whom robust health, or some strong talent auxiliary to their inspiration, has enabled to overcome the public prejudice of their own day. And too often the victory has been won at some cost to the abiding value of their work. Happy is the writer who, like Spinoza, has been able to make out a livelihood by grinding lenses, instead of demeaning himself to the tasks that humanity offers him through its agents the book- sellers and editors. Unhappy, who must echo the mournful cry of Shakespeare " My nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." And yet the title of genius to protection and relief 1 6 The New Word is no other than that of the idiot, the epileptic and the paralytic. Science has told us that the lunatic, the poet and the criminal are compact of one clay. The lives of the poets reveal them as sufferers from strange infirmities often beyond the reach of medical lore. The most precious possessions of literature are verily pearls, the glorious disguisement of some inward sore. Literature is the chief ornament of humanity ; and perhaps humanity never shows itself uglier than when it stands with the pearl shining on its forehead, and the pearl-maker crushed beneath its heel. There is in England a thing called a Royal Literary Fund, for the pretended purpose of showing charity to men of letters. By the published rules of this institution its alms are only to be bestowed on those whose lives and writings are alike free from reproach on the score of religion and morality. What a clause for the charter of a hospital ! It is evident that those responsible for this public insult to literature are inspired, not by compassion for genius, but by fear and hatred of genius. They know well that it is as hard for a great poet to be a regular church- goer and a respectable father of a family, as it is for themselves to write a great poem. Their true ob- ject is to give alms in the name of literature to the enemies of literature. And so they have built an asylum for well-behaved dunces, and have written over the door : " No admittance for Shakespeare and Goethe." The Riddle 17 ill If Nobel had made a bequest to literature, he would have done a brave thing. As it is, he has done a far braver. The word Literature is not an exact term, because literature is not an exact art. It is a term wide enough to cover every kind of communication by means of words, from the Song of Songs to the last newspaper advertisement. Nobel has manifestly used the word in a broad sense. He was not thinking of literature from the literary standpoint, nor has he laid the stress upon artistic merit. Instead of offering this prize for the best work of literature, he has offered it for the best work of idealism, coming within the field of literature. That such is his intention seems to be fully recog- nised by a provision in the statutes drawn up since the Testator's death to govern his Trustees : " The term ' literature ', used in the Will, shall be understood to embrace not only works falling under the category of Polite Literature, but also other writings which may claim to possess literary merit by reason of their form or their mode of exposition." The spirit which breathes in this bequest is the same which breathes in the others. The Testator has kept one end steadily in sight, the increase of human happiness. His method is to encourage those 1 8 The New Word whose work is, in his opinion, most beneficial to mankind, the work of the discoverer, the work of the idealist, the work of the peacemaker. In this bequest the word idealistic is mightier than the word literature, and must prevail over it. This is not an endowment of the author, but of some one greater than the author. IV Nobel died, and the publication of his Will brought about a significant discovery. No one could tell the meaning of the word idealist, or idealistic. The history of the word is glanced at in the follow- ing inquiry. Here it will be enough to say that while it was in use in all the leading languages of Europe in the Testator's lifetime, his Will revealed it as a riddle. In what astonishing senses the Testator's word was understood appears from the list of the explana- tions given me by educated men in various walks of life, soon after I had launched on this investigation. " Something to do with the imaginative powers." " Fanatical." " Altruistic." " Not practical." The Riddle 19 " Exact." " Poetical." " Intangible." " Sentimental." " True." " That which cannot be proved.' " The opposite to materialistic." The mood of humanity towards the poet is that of the schoolboy towards the butterfly without pity but without malice. Towards the prophet it is that of the sick child towards the physician one of angry resistance. There is no more pitiful sight than this ; mankind suffers under no such curse ; it is the tragedy of the world, the stoning of the messenger of good tidings. " Ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them." Alas ! it is in sacrifice to the dead prophet that the living prophet is offered up. There is no instinct much more deeply rooted in the heart of man than this old cannibal one that the suffering of the best man is for the benefit of man- kind. " I exiled Dante," exults proud Florence, " and lo ! the Divine Comedy ". "I hounded forth Moham- med," boasts Mecca, " and here is Islam." It needs a Diagoras to ask where are the votive offerings of those 2O The New Word who were wrecked. It takes a Nobel to discern the difference to mankind between the labours of Hercules and the agony of the Meriah. The instinct of hatred is stronger than reason. It is not to be baffled by etymologies. Whatever the uncertainty belonging to the Testator's language, his fourth bequest was taken very differently from the remainder of the Will. It drew to itself the prompt hostility of the two great schools of thought which divide between them the intellectual government of the world. Pharisee and Sadducee both scented danger in the unknown word. Both felt themselves threatened by something more formidable than a literary competition. The antagonism of both was summed up in the scornful criticism that Nobel had offered a prize for a new religion. Nobel himself was branded as a dreamer. There were those ready to insinuate that he had not been in his right mind. In the present age more than a hundred millions are paid every year for the repetition of old texts ; in England alone there are several custodians of prophecy who each receive every year a sum greater than that here proposed as the life's wage of the prophet. Nobel wished to give eight thousand pounds a year among .the writers of new texts. That was his dream. His madness lay there. Humanity is not mad to spend one hundred millions a year on phono- graphs. Nobel was mad to offer these few thousands for a living voice. The Riddle 21 VI On the whole the feeling aroused most by this bequest was incredulity. It was regarded as a chal- lenge to materialism, a word not really better under- stood than idealism, but taken to signify the spirit of modern science, triumphant in so many depart- ments of life. And in these days material science is very great, so that the very word idealist is in some discredit. There is an opinion abroad that while Idealism has been talking, Materialism has been doing. Materialist science has conferred endless benefits on mankind. It has given us new medicines and tools and car- riages, and all manner of useful and pleasant things. It has opened up the history of the world and man, and bidden him recast all his beliefs and habits. Inch by inch it has invaded every province of human knowledge ; and now it is carrying the war into the very citadel of Idealism, and beginning to measure nerves and brain cells instead of arguing about mind. Now this bequest does indeed come as a challenge, but not to those very materialists to whom the Testa- tor has given the chief place among his legatees. The challenge is a challenge to the idealists, to show that they also are contributing to benefit mankind. Because of that it must make an era in the history of philosophy. Three hundred years ago a challenge 22 The New Word was addressed by Bacon to the physical sciences, under the name of natural philosophy. His famous substitution of inductive for deductive reasoning amounted to no more than this advice : Learn from the things themselves, instead of from the words about the things. But in asking for fruits he pro- posed to the philosopher the same end that Nobel has proposed the benefit of mankind. It is since that date that the physical sciences have arisen out of their sleep and marched to victory. Height after height has been scaled, and all the glory of creation has burst on our eyes. But still our eyes remain dim eyes. The march of reason has not kept pace with that of knowledge. Men stand before the wonders of the scientific revelation as they formerly stood before the sculptured stones of Egypt, unable to decipher them, and half afraid to try. Nobel, it seems, has hoped for a Champollion. He has asked for interpretations. Like the Babylonian king of old, he has sent for the magicians and the astrologers, the Chaldeans and the soothsayers, and has bidden them expound anew the meaning of that dream which is called Life. For thousands of years the metaphysicians and moral philosophers, the theologians and logicians, have been muttering the words of their mystery in corners, now at last a brave man has flung down this bag of gold in the midst of them, and has said : Let us see what it all really comes to. Let us see if you can help men to live. The Riddle 23 VII In the field of Literature the academy and the idealist meet as natural foes. The academy is, by its constitution, the judge of literature, and not of truth. The idealist is only a man of letters by acci- dent there are no accidents ! by necessity. Of the very greatest teachers of mankind, only two are known to have written anything, and only of Moham- med can it be said that his book affords any measure of himself. To the perfect Idealist, Lao, is attributed the saying " Those who know do not speak ; those who speak do not know." When the idealist enters the field of Literature he does so from the opposite side to that of the academy. For him the spirit is everything, for the academy the form is everything. It would seem easier for the rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for the idealist to find grace with the academy. Yet the Testator has placed this endowment in the hands of the illustrious body styled the Swedish Academy. In doing so he has shown himself not less sagacious than in the rest of the Will. For he is not concerned with idealism as an end, but as a means. The end is still the benefit of mankind. To this end the idealist is called upon to choose speech rather than silence. When he speaks, he is to be judged by his words. Had the Testator done otherwise, had he directed 24 The New Word that the idealist was to be judged by his ideals, he would have done what he has been ignorantly accused of doing ; he would have founded a new Catholic Church. As it is, he has founded a Forum. By giving the prize to eloquence and not to truth, he has done what is best for the idealist, and best for mankind, and in the long run best for truth. He has secured the freedom of thought by the bondage of expression. This golden fetter is placed on the right foot. At the same time he has given back to literature by the word " marklig " all that is taken from it by the words " idealist tendency ". I cannot render it by the English word " distinguished ", because that has now become cant. By a distinguished man, we mean a man who has distinguished himself in a frock coat and tall hat and kid gloves ; by a distinguished writer one who has daintily picked his words out of a dictionary of synonyms, and made a delicate mosaic, rather than one in whose mind strong emotion has melted the element of language and cast down the diamond of literature. What the Testator has asked for is the most glorious work. VIII Nobel was not a man of letters. The great subtlety with which this Will is drawn is not that of the gram- marian or the lawyer, but that of a sincere mind The Riddle 25 thoroughly possessed of its purpose, and wresting words to that purpose. Has he not given this very legacy to the idealist who shall contribute most materially to benefit mankind ? The words of such a Testator must be approached in the spirit in which lawyers pretend to approach all testaments. The object must be not to explain the words by themselves, but to gather from them what the Testator wished to be done. It is in that spirit that I have tried to shape the following inquiry. The question I have asked myself is not, what is the meaning of the word Idealist, but, what did the Testator mean by it ? How I was tempted to undertake the task is here beside the question. I need only say that I began it just after the official publication of the Will, in the year 1901, and when it was the subject of discus- sion as a matter of public interest. It is as a member of the public, of that great Public designated by the Testator, under the name of mankind, as his ultimate heirs, that I am interested in this Will, and that, no one else coming forward, I have been bold to vindi- cate it. The six years that have elapsed since that time have not materially changed the situation. Striking works of an idealist tendency are not being written at the rate of one every year, or, if they are, they have not been brought to the notice of the Trustees of this bequest. In the dearth of such works the Trustees have done doubtless what the Testator might have consented to, if not what he has directed, in awarding this Prize as a testimonial to distinguished men of 26 The New Word letters at the close of their careers. In any case their discretion is absolute. But inasmuch as they have framed no authoritative interpretation of the governing word in the bequest, they seem to be in the position of a Court which has not yet delivered judgment, and therefore may be addressed without impertinence by any counsel interested in the case. I lay these imperfect suggestions before the public in the hope that they may be found of some interest, apart from their exciting cause ; and in the further hope that, if they do not increase, at any rate they cannot lessen, the public gratitude for a high and unique example of benevolence. For addressing them more directly to the illustrious body charged with the execution of the Trust I have no real excuse except that there would have been a certain affectation in doing otherwise. The Swedish Academy stands too far above me to need to notice anything I may say, unless it be moved to do so. I can only come before it, like Esther before the Persian king, and abide its sovereign pleasure. I make no claim to speak as an idealist. I am a scientist, and my science is ontology, commonly called truth : now this bequest is not in favour of works of a true tendency, nor even of the truest works of an idealist tendency. Nevertheless I think, perhaps, that Nobel might have pardoned what I do, and let me lay this little essay in interpretation as a wreath upon his tomb. SECOND HEAD THE PERSONAL EQUATION Descartes and the Sorbonne. i. Useless Literature. 2. A Personal Explanation. 3. The Blockade of the Schoolmasters. 4. Scientific Philology. 5. Truth and Verihood. 6. The White Mind. A) the astronomer, in order to tell fairly the time kept by a star in heaven, must first record the time taken by his own thought, and thereby correct his reckoning ; and as Descartes did not deem it beside the purpose to tell the Sorbonne that he was in his dressing-gown when he sat down to prove the exis- tence of God ; so it will not be vain for me to describe with what bias I approached my present task. An eloquent writer upon Art, in a work called The Seven Lamps of Architecture, has chosen Truth to be his second Lamp, and thereby shown that it was not his first wish to tell the truth about archi- tecture. Accordingly it is no surprise to see him begin 27 28 The New Word by defining architecture as useless building, and end, in a preface written long afterwards, by complaining that this very book had proved useless for its pur- pose. For if architecture be useless building, literature must be useless writing. It is significant, and it will not be found beside the question, that neither in this book, nor in other books treating of Gothic architecture, is there the least allusion to the architecture of the Goths. The origin of the Gothic church, like the origin of everything else in Europe, has been sought on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. No one has asked why the Italian masons, when they crossed the Alps, as they are still crossing them to-day, in search of work, left off building like the Romans, and began building otherwise. No one seems to know that the Gothic church, in its essential features, features that have been copied in St. Peter's, is a copy of the Gothic hall as it was built in Iceland in the days of Charlemagne, and as it was built in Gothland in the days of Herod. To say that truth had been my first lamp in this inquiry would be only to say that I was a Gothic writer, or, as men write it in my native land, a Jute. I have approached the word Idealist in the spirit of a Goth seeking to understand a Mediter- ranean word. I have approached it in the spirit of a child seeking to understand a schoolmaster's word. I have been like a sleeper, waking out of an enchanted sleep, and seeking to understand an enchanter's word. My first, and, to the best of my endeavour, my only, light in this inquiry has been the light of veri- hood. The Personal Equation 29 ii The foreword of this Letter was really written thirty years ago, when a mere schoolboy, hardly knowing what he did, chose Truth as being for him the one sacred Name. Afterwards, when I had read the book in which Darwin reminded us clearly of a fact dimly familiar to our forefathers, I laid it down with the reflection that most other books would have to be re-written in the light of that forgotten fact. The question was how to begin. I spent the next twenty years in exploring the human mind as it is revealed in literature, and as it is revealed in life. I have not passed the time shut up in libraries. I have been a speaker and a writer ; I have been a lawyer and a soldier ; I have been a ruler and a judge. I have taught children, and learned from them. I have talked with the learned in their colleges, and talked with the Black men in their own land beside the Black River, in the oldest and most catholic speech, the language of Signs. In a place where no White man had been before me, I found a Black king and his folk withheld by an old curse from planting a medicinal tree ; and I broke the curse by showing to them a stone whereon a Greek of long ago had carved the figure of his God. In such ways I have learned somewhat of the nature of words. 30 The New Word At the same time I have learned somewhat of the feelings that words express, and found the same feeling underlying many different words ; as if all men, in all ages, and in all lands, were trying to say much the same thing. And hardly knowing whether I had found anything worth saying, nor how far the words that were right for me would be right for others, I doubted whether I should speak. In our time there are many honourable men and women who share my doubt. They have been put to sleep in childhood with certain words, most true and beautiful to those who spoke them first ; and they have awakened out of that sleep with great pain, and as those who are bereft of hope. Now such a man as I speak of, a Materialist, came to me one day, and told me he had been consulted by a mother, who was also a Materialist, about the education of her child, a child who will one day occupy a great place in the world, and influence the lives of many other children. And, both being Materialists, he had given her the advice, and she had taken it, that the child's mind should be put to sleep by the words which they themselves both believed to be untrue. The following day I found in the organ of my trades-union as an author the announcement of Nobel's Testament. On reading the Fourth Bequest my first reflection was the sad one that such a Trust could hardly be carried out. Then I asked myself why ? What books did the Testator wish to be written ; why were they not being written ; and why, if they should be written, must they nevertheless fail of their reward ? The The Personal Equation 31 answer seemed to lie in the meaning of the word Idealist. What was its meaning ? or rather what was its meaning for other minds than my own ? I turned to the dictionary ; what I found led me further ; I began to make notes, and presently saw they were the book I had waited for so long to begin. The natural shape of this inquiry, therefore, is that of a train of thought, and I have not striven to give it any other. As, when the chemical salts are held in solution in the glass, the introduction of some foreign body will cause them to encircle it with crys- tals, so have the floating thoughts of half a lifetime come together in answer to a single question, and settled into shape. Ill Literature, from the lyric's pure cry of pain or joy down to the pill-seller's advertisement, is a com- munication. There is a personal equation of the reader as well as of the writer, and the fairest lan- guage is a bargain between two minds. The coun- sel's speech to the jury is not as his speech to the judge. The greatest of playwrights has written for the gallery as well as for the boxes. It is the second equation in which the difficulty lies. It is that equation the thought of which caused the perfect Idealist to condemn speech. It is that which stands in the way of Nobel's Fourth Bequest. 32 The New Word My gallery is a gallery of judges ; by which I mean that I speak in the hearing of those with whom I am called on to- quarrel, whose minds are so much fixed on their own study as to be unable to think freely about that or any other. The ontologist claims all the provinces of knowledge as his fatherland, and he is treated as a trespasser in each. On every frontier the specialist with his fixed bayonet keeps watch and ward, as though he dreaded to give or to receive. The freetrader in knowledge bears the smuggler's brand. But it once made my holiday to take food through the midst of six great navies to starving men on a Mediterranean isle ; and shall I now fear to run the blockade of the schoolmasters, if I believe they are keeping children from the bread of life ? The man of letters will need no explanation of why I have found the dogma of philology to be the devil's leading counsel in this debate. To the philo- logist, whose history for I cannot yet call it science has helped and hindered me by turns, I owe an honourable salute before the foils are crossed. The sciences fall roughly into two groups, according to whether they come before or after man. The human sciences begin with folk-lore, and Darwin's book has given them a natural starting-point. The anthropologist holds the key to the position, and without his light all other students of the arts of man are wandering at random in the dark, and letting themselves be thwarted needlessly. In his broad-minded treatise on the Kalevala, Comparetti has brought together much learning to The Personal Equation 33 elucidate the name and nature of the Sampa, the mystic lucky-box whose making and carrying off are main links in the poem. But the Sampa contains no puzzle for the folk-learner. There is just such a lucky-box in every West African hut. The serious- minded Black would no more think of setting up house without it than the Christian without his family Bible, or the scientist without his drain. You can buy a Sampa at any wizard's for a few cowrie- shells. The wizard makes it while you wait. He takes a bit of clay, and a feather, and a twig of straw, and whatever else strikes his fancy, and sticks them together in a calabash ; and the householder puts it in his house to conjure away the spirits of misfortune and disease one of whom science has now identified with the anopheles mosquito. That is the Sampa, and it is a prayer, written in the old magic letters which the spirits, or the mosquitos, are most likely to understand ; a language in which the wizard is a specialist, and the philologist not even a smat- terer. Philology needs the light of folklore more than any other study needs it, because words are the most elusive work of man. They are the birds and butterflies of man's creation, and the philologist shows his love for them by trying to transfix them on Grimm's pin ; by tearing them out of the sky with his Aryan shotgun, and giving them glass beads for eyes, and souls of cotton-wool. He is bitten by the mania for exactness, and his study is the one study in which exactness must almost certainly be wrong. When he rules out the guesses of the un- c 34 The New Word trained mind, he is ruling out the mind that shaped those very words of his ; he is contemning what ought to be his fundamental law. The wild man's mind ran wild, and it was volatile to catch the most fanciful resemblances between words, as his tongue was volatile to rhyme their sounds. His words were spelt, like Mr. Weller's name, according to the taste and fancy of the speller. The Athenian crowd that checked Demosthenes for a wrong accent was no more like the group before a Tartar tent that hung upon the earliest Tale of Troy than a first-night audience in a London theatre is like the ring of naked Blacks who look on at their native pantomime in the Australian scrub. I am now interpreting a Will, and not writing an encyclopaedia ; though I should like to persuade some living Nobel to organise the writing of an encyclo- paedia on scientific lines, to replace the alphabetical chaos on the shelves of the Free Library ; one who would recognise, as this Will recognises, that the books are more important than the shelves, and the Librarian more important than the Library. Here I can only so far outline the scientific canons of philology as to justify the interpretation that fol- lows, and to show that what otherwise might seem my careless handling of words is founded on greater care. The Personal Equation 35 IV If we should judge the mind of Europe by the work in various fields of learners like Retzius and Sergi and Massey and Montelius, we should think it had recovered from that disease of word-lore re- membered as the Aryan Myth. But all philologists have by no means recovered. I have before me the latest and best work on English etymologies ; and Professor Skeat must be the whipping-boy of worser men. By way of groundwork he has a list of imaginary Aryan roots, as though the Aryans were a historic nation, dwelling in some country called Aryana, whose literary remains were before him. That is not so, and the buried cities of Bokhara, perhaps, hold many surprises in store for the philologist. But even if it were so, Aryan would not be the last word on English etymology. These roots were invented by men who had not read Darwin, or, like Max Muller, did not believe in him ; and if they are anything but fancies, they are not roots but stems cut off from their roots. The study of words from such a beginning is no more scientific than a young lady's album of dried leaves is scientific botany. There are only two sound starting-points for the history of a word ; one is where the word itself begins, in the wild man's cry, or the technical coinage which is manifest in The New Word Nobel's dynamite ; the other is where our know- ledge of it begins, in the dead manuscript and in the living mouth. The first starting-point is the philo- logist's, the second is the lexicographer's. The imaginary Aryan stem is a mere generalisation of comparative lexicography. Not only has the author ignored anthropology, but he has ignored geology, geography and history. He has ignored the Ice-Cap, and with it the fact that Europe must have been colonised from Africa long before it was conquered from Asia. The Black man crossed the strait of Gibraltar, if even there were a strait, in his canoe, ages before the White man drove his wagon across the snow-bound steppes of Russia. The English language has more sources than the English philologist has dreamed of. Only the other day an astronomer, measuring Stonehenge after measuring the Great Pyramid, learned what Massey had long before learned from folk-lore, that Pharaoh has left his mark in Britain. He deals with words as though they were all under a vow of celibacy, like the monkish writers who have done so much to disfigure and disguise them. Whereas one half of English words are in their present shape the offspring of Dutch mothers and Latin fathers, or Latin mothers and Dutch fathers, whose features may be still discerned in them ; to say nothing of the French and Scandinavian strains. For instance, the remarkable word very or werry for Mr. Weller followed Piers Plowman in spelling it with two rs is labelled as being the French vrai, from the Low Latin veracus. Whereas vrai, which The Personal Equation 37 the Provengal Mr. Weller spells yverai, as I have tested by experiment, has no more to do with veracus in form than with very in meaning. This strong word which stands out in modern French like a rock against the tide of verite, verifier, veritable and veri- dique, emerging from the monkish effort to write it verai, as a rock emerges from the waves, is, like its brother mac, a Frankish word, and its English and Latin representatives are (w) right and rectus. (We meet it letter for letter in the English bewray, and catch the counter-sense in awry.) The sense underlying it, which is a scientific root, is the strength of the wrist, as in wringing or wreaking (Skeat has seen that the brother word mac is wreck], in short it is the strength of working. The sense underlying verus and veracus, and the Dutch waar, and, to what- ever extent, the English very, is the strength of the ear, in being ware, and wary, in short it is the strength of hearing. And these are not imaginary Aryan roots, but sensible human ones ; and if they do not please the philologist, perhaps they will please the psychologist. The common term of vrai and vents, I suspect, is not veracus but vir, as man is the common term of working and hearing. And that is the sense which I catch faintly breathing in very, like the scent of a flower lingering in a jar. For very is not an adverb, nor an adjective, as Skeat carelessly reckons it ; neither does it mean " true " and " truly " as he pretends, to support his derivation from veracus. We cannot say that a man is very, nor that he speaks very. It is an The New Word intensitive particle, unique in the language, and serving the office of a declension before adverbs and adjectives. Such a word must have a complex pedigree, and I tell only half the truth in saying that its story is the story of vrai inside out. For just as vrai is a Frankish word which has absorbed a Roman meaning, that of " true," so very has ac- cepted a partly Roman spelling while preserving an Anglo-Saxon meaning. And that meaning is very nearly the original one of vrai. For not only does very mean " right " rather than " true " or " truly ", as may be seen at a glance in such uses as " yours very truly ", " the very man for the post " and " Very Reverend ", but it has displaced " right " in those very uses. It is, however, inferior to right in strength, as the dean is inferior to the bishop ; and without pretending to give a thorough account of it, I think the clue may be found in Mr. Weller's and Piers Plowman's double r, and that it may be either a composition or a confusion of waar and right. Verrey suggests to my ear much more an imaginary Latin verrectus, than any Low Latin veracus. The English philologist has not got beyond the state of mind of the Australian Black, who has not yet found out the father's share in child-begetting, and believes children to be ancestral spirits who have entered the mother's womb when she was walk- ing past a grave. He has not got so far as the Black, because even the Black sees the features of the an- cestor in the child, and the philologist does not see the Gothic features in many a dog-latin word that has crept like a cuckoo into an Anglo-Saxon nest. The Personal Equation 39 He has accepted with childlike trust the story of the monk who, writing with the Book of Joshua for his model, has described the Angles and Saxons as sweeping over the island like a swarm of locusts, and leaving no British man, woman or child alive to be their thralls or wives. And that was not so. The Roman chesters did not all go down like Jericho, leaving not one stone upon another, as soon as Hengist landed in the Isle of Thanet ; neither did all the Welsh flee into Wales. The differences between English and Swedish are some of them Welsh differ- ences and Finnish differences, as the differences between Spanish and Italian are Iberian differences. The philologist seems never to have heard any one speaking English, but to believe that his own learned dialect is the speech used in the nursery and on the farmstead. And that is not so. What Skeat rarely and unwillingly refers to as " provincial English " is very English, and many words that he refers to as English are provincial Latin. Thus the word verity has never been acclimatised, but is a lexicographer's exotic. As soon as it is written verihood, to match the Dutch waarheid and the Swedish warheit, it rhymes with falsehood, and sounds like an English word. The philologist sits in his library, and cons the dusty manuscripts in which Roman missionaries and Latin scholars have quaintly travestied the native speech, while underneath his windows the children playing in the street are pouring out better information from the well of English undefiled. As soon as the English get away from colleges in some wild land that Caesar never knew, their own words 40 The New Word bubble up like a natural spring, and the Aryan root is found budding and blossoming again. The last great struggle of all those that have gone to make English took place in and around London, and the chief antagonists were the Low Dutch dialects of the East coast, as the spoken language, and provincial Latin as the written one. The com- promise has been drawn up in spelling, and as the spelling was in the hands of the writers, the record is a one-sided one, and by that one-sided record English philology has long been led astray. It is an encouraging sign that Skeat should be the first to allow that the Netherland dialects may have had some influence on English, though he characteristic- ally does not look deeper than such historical in- cidents as the treaties of Edward III and the ex- peditions of Elizabeth. Were he aware that within living memory the Yarmouth fisherman understood his Rotterdam neighbour better than his Plymouth countryman, the philologist might be brought to see that the Dutch word-book is likely to be a safer guide than most monkish manuscripts to " provincial English." In the meanwhile I hope he will accept these sug- gestions in the spirit in which they are uttered, as those of a provincial Englishman. The Personal Equation 41 Since I first wrote this Letter there has come into my hands a work by Breal entitled La Semantique, which an English professor of philology treats as the first recognition of the need for a science, or at least a history, of the meanings of words. That seems to be the science the need for which was recog- nised by Socrates in the market place of Athens, and that is the science I have had to piece out for myself as best as I could in this inquiry ; and which I call verihood, instead of truth. Truth is the merit of the speaker rather than of the speech. The speaker may be truthful, and yet his story may not be true. The witness who is sworn to tell " the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ", is only sworn to tell what happened as he saw it. He does not swear that he saw rightly, and that his story is the correct one. The correct story has to be put together by the jury, who are sworn to give " a true verdict according to the evi- dence ". The verdict is the collected and corrected truth. No imaginary Aryan root has been found for truth. But its sensible root underlies words like try and utter, in short it is the strength of the tongue. The imaginary Aryan root, offered by Skeat with a " perhaps," for verihood, is war, one of four wars, and said to mean 42 The New Word " to choose," and thence " to believe." For its sensible root we have only to go out into the play- ground. Ware ! is a cry that can still be heard on the lips of the English schoolboy. It is found in written English in such words as aware and wary. The word wary calls up a picture of the wild man of the woods, crouched with one ear to the ground, his fingers tightening on his knife, and his whole soul astrain to catch the first faint rustle that shall bewray the hidden foe. Such a cry as Ware ! is worth a library of manuscripts. We need no imaginary Aryan root to help us to its meaning. It means " Hear with all your might ! " It is the strength of the ear at its highest pitch. If there be any root in word-lore this cry must be it. It is perhaps the one word in English that has come straight down without a change from the real Aryans ; and it is not to be found in the Etymological Dictionary ! On these lines truth and verihood explain each other. Both words imply a speaker and a listener. What the one tries to tell is truth, and what the other yearns to hear is verihood. Of these two the important standpoint is the listener's, because it is for his sake that the speech is made, and what he hears is all that has been really and effectually said. The impression matters more than the expression. The gist of the speech is what is left in the mind of the listener, and by his understanding of it it must be judged. Hence verihood is a greater word than truth, as the verdict is greater than the evidence. Verihood is the bull's eye that truth aims at, and falsehood the The Personal Equation 43 inner or outer it must so often be content to hit. And that is to say, in other words, that verihood's opposite pole is truth, and its circumference falsehood. The science of semantics is thus revealed as a branch of physical mathematics. The semantological specialist will now be able to define the word Idealist for himself. My story is meant to be read by the untrained mind. VI It has been well said that all the stories in the world have only forty plots between them, and all the words have not many more sensible roots. We are indebted to Erdmann for the hint that the name Goth meant brave, much as Frank meant free, the aut of the Icelandic Gautar being one with the aud of the Latin audax, or audacious which Mrs. Gamp, with nicer scholarship than that of Oxford, sounded owdacious. Be that as it may, an outspoken work calls for a brave reader ; and I am writing to the Gothic mind, that is to say, to the White mind rather than the Black. For the ontologist there are no coincidences, but only Rhymes. I will not think it is for nothing that in the queen city of the Baltic, in the homeland of the Goths, from which, as from the citadel of the White race, went forth those armies that struck 44 The New Word down the Rome of Caesar, and once again scared back the Roman eagle from Pomerania to the Danube ; I will not think it is in vain that a countryman of Alaric and Gustav Adolf has given it in charge to that illustrious Court which symbolises the White mind in its pre-eminence, to draw up by its decisions the canon of the scriptures of the new age. The mathe- matician has a greater license than the poet to ignore reality in working out his problems. I shall be forgiven if I have sometimes lost sight of the Academy of to-day in that White City of the North ; if I have sometimes forgotten a thousand years and written to the Academy that shall sit hereafter, in the new Asgard, in the Hall of the Aesir ; forgiven if I have sometimes lifted up my eyes, and written as in the sight of the White Gods. To understand, says the French poet, is to forgive. Yet which of us can hope wholly to understand another, or to be understood ? Which of us can thoroughly pierce, from within or from without The shell we slaves of time drag with us ever, Through which our souls, as if immured in glass, Become distorted, and we peer and strain, But find each other's real features never ; A fateful screen that friendship cannot pass, And love beats his soft wings against in vain. THIRD HEAD THE CASTLE IN THE AIR A Golden Talisman. i. The Babu Speech. 2. Bad Language. 3. '.' Dynamite." 4. The Science of Shells. 5. Idol and Ideal. 6. An Algebraical Expression. WHAT is the meaning of the word Idealist, or Idealistic, as used by Nobel in this Testa- ment ? The question is not what is Idealism ? It is what kind of books did the Testator wish to receive this Prize ? It will be seen at once that the second of these questions is very much easier to answer than the first. No one has ever succeeded in defining poetry to any one else's satisfaction a chemist might define it as the crystal of prose but universities and academies award prizes every year for poems, and no difficulty is felt as to what works are eligible for the prize. Again, an able writer named Austin once set himself to determine the province of jurispru- dence. He died leaving his work unfinished ; and the extensive fragment that remains is an endless chain of definitions, not one of them complete. He attempts to define a law, a right, and so on, and the more he toils, the more endless his task becomes, 45 4 6 The New Word Yet the Courts never sit for a day without using the words law and right in some practical application ; and Austin was himself professor of jurisprudence. The difference between a legal argument and a logical one is that the former is concerned with some practical issue, such as the disposal of a sum of money, and is determined by the judgment of a Court. That is the difference which Nobel has made by this be- quest. This bag of gold of his is, as it were, a talis- man, trusting in which we may adventure in the enchanted wood of words ; by means of which we may conjure the demons that infest it, and compel the sorcerer's victims to resume their natural shape. As well as a talisman, we are provided with a compass, by the words which are the governing clause of the whole Testament " the benefit of mankind." Should we be tempted to stray into devious paths, should we find ourselves wandering round and round without advancing from our start- ing-point, we have only to glance at this compass, and it will point us forward in the right direction, towards the enchanted castle of the ogre. So armed, so guided, the White Knight Errant ought to reach his bourn. The Castle in the Air 47 Ideal, Idealism, Idealist these words are current in most of the languages of Europe, but they are not natives of any. They appear in the same form in Swedish and in English, but they are not of Swedish nor of English growth. They wear a look of ancient Greece, but yet they are not genuine Greek words. Plato never heard of them ; the Greek lexicon knows them not. They belong to a large and increasing class of words which I can best characterise by naming them Babu. The English in India, whether to make the task of government easier, or in the belief that our civilisa- tion must be better for the Hindus than their own, have set up schools to train the natives in our ways, and, to begin with, in our speech. There is a large class of natives called Babus who learn very readily up to a certain point, that is to say, they write our words correctly, and they have some notion of what the words mean ; but English has not replaced their native speech, and hence it fits them like a borrowed garment, and they are betrayed into awkward and laughable mistakes in using it, which have given rise to the term Babu English. Now that is just the process from which a great part of Europe, and especially England itself, has 48 The New Word been suffering for many hundreds of years. Our speech bewrays us to be the freedmen of Rome. Our schools are Roman schools set up by missionaries from the Mediterranean in whose minds it was the very aim and end of education to tame the young barbarian of the North into an obedient provincial of the great Roman Raj. Saint Ninian, it is candidly recorded, went to convert the Picts to Christianity in the hope of putting an end to their attacks upon their Christian neighbours. The work of the monks has remained practically untouched ever since. Our schools are still called grammar schools, which means Latin-grammar schools, and Latin is the chief thing taught in them. Latin is the official language of our universities, and by an educated man we mean a man who has been taught Latin. The whole theory of our education still is that the young Englishman should make-believe to be an ancient Roman. The king who still writes himself on his coins Britannorum Bex is doing homage for his crown to Caesar and to Gregory. After the Normans came in aid of the monks England seemed to hang in doubt between the Gothic and Romance dialects. The result of this is seen in our vocabulary. We have, in a more marked degree than any other European people, two sets of words, folk words and book words. The first we learn at home, and use most in talking ; the second we learn at school, and use most in writing. The folk words come to us as the wrappings of our earliest thoughts and feelings, and form, as it were, the mind's natural skin. The book words follow after the brain has The Castle in the Air 49 begun to harden, and are more like clothing which the mind puts on. We use them as children who walk in wooden shoes, not with the same sure and elastic tread as they who go barefoot. Let it not be thought that all this is beside the question. It goes to the heart of the question. That schoolmaster's Latin should be a Latin which would make Cicero stare and laugh is a little evil. But that men should go through life talking to one an- other in words which they only half understand is a great evil. And that children should have their minds beaten and bent out of shape by such words has long seemed to me the most frightful evil in the world. There is a word which we spell quack, and our Dutch kinsfolk kwak. With us it means a false pre- tender to knowledge ; in Holland it is the nickname for a Latin-school pupil. The little Dutch street boy in the Middle Ages, listening outside the door of the Latin school, heard the boys inside repeating their hie hcec hoc, and it sounded to him like the gabbling of ducks. I share the feeling of that little street boy. I also stand outside the door of the Latin school, and listen to the patter that goes on inside, without any reverence. I should like to break open the door of the Latin school, and take that dusty, dog-eared grammar-book out of the schoolmaster's hand, and put an end for ever to that miserable gabble. Somehow I think that the work of the Idealist will have to begin here. 50 The New Word ii Unhappily the priests of science have shown them- selves not less prone than other priesthoods to im- pose on the mind of man by means of bad language. To the medieval plague of dog-latin there has suc- ceeded in these latter days the plague of Babu Greek. The apologists for this vice of science tell us that it is merely a kind of shorthand. I am sorry I do not find that it is really quicker to write dolichocephal that longhead, or ichthyosauros than eft. But in any case the number of readers who carry at their tongue's end all the words found in the extant remains of Hellenic literature is very small. So that whatever trouble the specialist may save to himself by writing chaemoprosopic for broad-faced, he causes to his readers, who have to turn the shorthand into longhand as they go along. Hence a modern scientific work is not truly a book. It is more and more a manual in which the text is helped out by technical signs. It is not so much literature as algebra. The Castle in the Air 5 1 in Nevertheless if the use of these bastard Mediter- ranean words were confined to the naming of things like rocks and plants and animals the quarrel with them might be left to the man of letters. Words like amoeba and neolithic are ugly and tiresome, but they are not false and mischievous. There is even a subtle elegance in naming fossils in a fossil tongue. It is a very different matter when such words are caught hold of to name thoughts instead of things ; and when men make-believe that they have said something in shorthand which they could not say in longhand. The difference cannot be illustrated better than by the two words of this class which are peculiarly associated with the name of Nobel dynamite and idealist. Dynamite is the name of a mixture which Nobel made, and as long as we have the mixture itself the name is of no consequence. The mixture might as well have been named strongness or starkhet, or X, or nobelite ; even it if had been labelled by the Greek word for weakness instead of strength it still would not have mattered. Because if we want to know what dynamite is we need not go to the Greek lexi- con ; we can go to the mixture itself. 52 The New Word Now that is just what we cannot do in the case of the word idealist. If Nobel had pointed out any book, for instance Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia, or Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, or Carlyle's Sartor Resar- tus, as the kind of book he meant to receive the prize, we should have had something in the nature of a mixture. As it is, " idealist " remains the name of a thought in Nobel's mind. Instead of being able to look past the name to the thing, we have to guess, if we can, the thought from the name. It is just here that the harmfulness of Babu makes itself manifest. It is when we pass from the outer world of things to the inner world of thoughts that we need to be most careful of the words we use ; it is then that the Mediterranean words are apt to serve us like ill-made panes of glass through which the light comes crookedly ; and the spirit of man, bound in these borrowed cerements, ceases to soar and grow. It was not by accident that the Protestant Refor- mation began with the translation of the Mass Book. The great reformers disagreed about many other things, but a common instinct made them teach men to pray in their native tongue. They reformed the churches the pity of it is that they did not reform the schools. The Castle in the Air 53 IV The word before us, then, is nob a label, the sort of word that the old Mediterranean grammar-books call a noun. It is what they ignorantly call an adjec- tive ; it is the expression of a feeling, like those unshapen cries in which speech began. It is the expression of a wish ; perhaps a wish not quite dis- tinct in the Testator's own mind ; perhaps a hope rather than a wish. It seems to me that he may have used an indis- tinct word because his wish was indistinct. He may have hoped that he could say in shorthand what he could not say in longhand, that Babu could say what Swedish could not say. I think, on the other hand, that if he had cast about to find a Swedish word it would have helped us to understand his wish. I think that to translate his word would be almost to interpret it. The mind may be likened to a tree whose roots are feelings and whose leaves are words. Some words leave off where they begin, they are emotions ex- pressed in sound, like musical notes such as the old grammar-books call interjections. But most words have taken shape by coming into touch with outside sounds, and with the sights and scents, the tastes and touches, that go together with the sounds. Whether the word thing or think comes first in his- 54 The New Word tory, a thought is a feeling outlined by means of things. In this way there is in every word a native element of feeling, or a mark set on it by the world of sense, which cleaves to it through whatever uses it may pass and change. The word may be abstracted and refined away, till it appears like a balloon in the air ; but still it will be a captive balloon, attached by some root meaning, as by a cord, to the firm earth beneath. Philology begins with the changes in the forms of words. Our lexicons have long been cabinets of shells. Yet the morphology of words is but a drud- gery unless it helps us towards their physiology. The word Idealist is such a shell. Let us see what its outward form can tell us of the life within. Idealist is a Babu formation from the Greek Idea. Idea, my Greek lexicon reports, is the appearance of a thing, as opposed to its reality. And it is un- fortunately the case that some such sense as that of opposition to reality does haunt the word Idealist, and discredit it. No one is likely to believe that works of an apparent or unreal tendency are of much benefit to mankind. We must dig deeper. Idea can be traced to ido, or eido, (for there were The Castle in the Air 55 more Greeks than those who corrected Demosthenes) meaning to look or see. It is the Aryan word which has become in English though. "It is as though " means " it looks like." And so the word idea, in its first sense, may be rendered pretty closely by the English look, in such uses as " the look of the thing," " there is a look of his father about him." The passage from the idea to the ideal was not made by the Greeks. But it seems that idea is the Ionian form of the word which meets us in other Greek dialects as eidos, and although the Greeks did not add the important letter / to idea, they did add it to eidos ; and their eidolon is spelt by us idol. What is the difference between the ideal and the idol ? The idol is the idea embodied in wood or stone. It seems to have grown solid by degrees. There was first the mere look, or likeness, and next the ghost. We catch the shade of meaning in passing from " appearance " to " apparition." Lastly there came the marble likeness of the ghost ; as it were, the materialised idea. Now whatever else the ideal may be, it is not a marble image. Bacon, it is true, uses the word idol in a sense not far removed from ideal. He uses it as a Christian metaphor for thoughts that receive honour not their due, as the images of Jupiter and Venus received honour due to Christ. But if we should take ideal as meaning a thought that received too much honour, it is clear that a work of an idealist tendency would be harmful, rather than beneficial, to mankind. Nevertheless Bacon's usage gives us a useful hint. The ideal is evidently a thought rather The New Word than a statue, and to that extent it may be called a metaphorical idol. In what, then, does it differ from an idea ? The Greek lexicon has not half done its work in telling us that idea meant appearance. Even in Plato's time it had got farther than that. Aquinas, who wrote in Latin, and translates it by the Latin forma, explains idea as being the builder's plan of a not- yet-built house. Now my Dutch word-book renders idea (as an English word) by ontwerp, which is to say, out-throw that which the mind throws out, and not what it takes in. And hi Holland a builder's plan is called an ontwerp. When the mind of a great Roman theologian jumps with the common mind of a Dutch folk, we ought to be able to take the result with some security. And it is the opposite pole of the meaning given us by the lexicon. The idea is not the appearance of a thing already there, but rather the imagination of a thing not yet there. It is not the look of a thing, it is a looking forward to a thing. Here, then, is the difference between the ideal and the idol. The ideal is not the realisation in brick and mortar of the builder's plan, as the idol is the realisation in marble of the sculptor's plan. The ideal is not a house made with hands ; it is a castle in the air. The Castle in the Air 57 VI The word ideal first appears in English as an adjec- tive. The added I has much the same force in Greek and English, the force of -ly or like, the Swedish lik. It is hard not to see in this like a connection with look, such as that between idea and ido. Eng- lish philology, however, speaking by the latest of its interpreters, traces it to the old English lie, mean- ing a body, like the Swedish lik (corpse). If that were so, the ideal would be again the embodied idea, in short the idol. It would be the house, and not the castle in the air. Of course it is not so. It puts the cart before the horse. Philology has made its favourite mistake of thinking the noun is older than the adjective. The name of an outward shape is never the first form of any word, unless it be a word like cuckoo, or the French word teuf-teuf. We must dig deeper. When we come down to such a word as lick, the Swedish slika, the very sound of the tongue in licking, we cannot go much farther ; and we may be sure that we have got the root of the word, and all words naturally springing out of it. We do not need to look in Beowulf or the Saxon Chronicle for the mean- ing of such a word. English philology has gone blind through too much poring over manuscripts. The The New Word Old English manuscripts that have come down to us are few, and they are not very old. There are more fish in the sea than in the fisherman's net. The early man was a poet before he was a philo- logist, and perhaps it takes a poet to understand those words of his, which were not dead shells, but living cells, growing and changing with his growing and changing moods. What the tongue does in licking is what the eye does in looking, it feels-forth, reaching outward from the man. The words look and see contain between them the whole secret of metaphysics. To look is to search forth for what may be there ; to see is to take in what the look finds. Looking is the question, and sight the an- swer. Sight is materialistic, perhaps looking may turn out to be idealistic. If, then, the mysterious I does not add a body to the idea, what does it add ? It is, in its root- meaning, the same with idea. We seem to be dealing with an algebraical expression. Ideal is idea to the second power. We might as well write it idea' 2 . The knot remains unpicked. For this powerful idea seems very much like an idol of the mind. The writer who has given the word most currency in English is Carlyle, and he uses it in very much that sense. He speaks of " low ideals " as well as " high ideals," and of the " ideal of brute strength " as a bad ideal. If there be bad ideals as well as good ideals, a work of an idealist tendency may easily be harmful, instead of beneficial, to mankind. The value of an ideal to mankind must depend on some- thing else beside its power. Even if it should be The Castle in the Air 59 argued that this bequest is meant for works of a fanatical tendency, yet it will not be argued that it is for all such works, including the fanaticism of the Dominican, and including the fanaticism of the Thug. Thus far the science of shells has brought us. It is time to check Philology by Lexicography. FOURTH HEAD THE PLAY UPON WORDS Johnson's Dictionary. i. The Missing Word. 2. Recurring Decimals. 3. A Puzzle for Atheists. 4. Plato Refuted by Plato. 5. Books in Chains. ON reading this Will for the first time, and won- dering what the word Idealistic meant to others than myself, I turned to an English dictionary. The dictionary which I found to my hand hap- pened to be the famous work of Doctor Johnson, or, to be more careful, one founded on that work by Doctor Latham, who was an esteemed philologist, and pro- fessor of the English language. It is in four vast volumes, published just fourteen years before the date of the Testator's death, by nineteen publishers, and it should be fairly representative of the science and art of lexicography in England. The words are taken in the order of their spelling ; each one is given a Latin label such as substantive or adjective ; if in its sound or spelling it shows the mark of the Roman mint a Mediterranean word is 60 The Play upon Words 61 quoted as its original ; then follows the explanation (the thing I was in search of) and Johnson's Dic- tionary is renowned for its explanations ; and lastly there come extracts from books in which the word is used. These extracts were styled by Johnson his authori- ties. His whole habit of mind withheld him from seeing that the speech of the English folk is a higher authority than any book. " Of the laborious and mercantile part of the people (he writes), the diction is in a great measure casual and mutable." That is not so. The folk keep their native words much longer and much better than the bookmen. Hundreds of English words long buried under the dust of Dryas- dust are coming to light, and are returning into English literature from the ends of the earth, to- day. Johnson, it is plain, could not rid himself of the old monkish way of looking at it. To him the right English was a barbarous provincial dialect ; the language worthy of a scholar's attention was that which came closest to the Roman pattern. He has told us this, really, by calling his work a dictionary and not a word-book. The same wrongheadedness makes itself manifest in his treatment, and in Latham's treatment, of some words admitted to these volumes. There are many words common to both the Baltic and the Mediterranean ; some of them common to every Aryan dialect ; some of them older than the Aryan invasion, if there was an Aryan invasion, relics of the old stone-cutting race that crossed from Africa in the wake of the retreating ice. The Roman 62 The New Word missionaries latinised some of these words, much as they christianised the pagan folklore. And so to-day the Johnsons and the Lathams mark as Roman im- portations words that are only Roman in the spelling, words that were rooted in the northern speech before one stone of Rome was laid upon another. Many of the words thus treated dropped out of spoken English, and their place was taken by others whose outline was too stubborn to be effaced by foreign spelling. Thus the English folk, robbed of verihood by the monks, instinctively refused the Roman verity, and took refuge in truth. If a man does not know these things by heart, if he has never caught a true glimpse into the history of words, what can he tell us about their meanings ? If he cannot see that even the spellings, the outer shells of words, are often palimpsests in which the writing on the surface hides another and yet another writing underneath if he cannot see this, how can we hope that his glance will be keener when he comes to consider the meaning which is the life of the word ; and that his explanation of it will be anything better than the gabble of the Latin school ? I turned to Doctor Latham's volumes with mis- giving, and the first discovery I made was an ominous one. The word used by Nobel was not there. The Play upon Words 63 II Instead I found this entry : " Idealist substantive. Supporter of the doctrine of idealism." The only inference was that a work of an idealist tendency must be one supporting the same doctrine. I asked Doctor Latham what the doctrine was, and I got this answer : " Idealism. System of metaphysical philosophy founded upon the doctrine that the objects of the external world are what they are, less on the strength of any material properties of their own, than through the action of the mind, in which they exist as ideas." At the first blush my plight seemed to be worse than Herakles', when he cut off the hydra's head ; I had a dozen Babu words to deal with instead of one. I made shift to turn some of them into English. " The stones and trees of the outside world are what they are, less on the strength of any stuff of their own, than through the working of the mind, in which they stand forth as ideas" Before examining the doctrine further it seemed desirable to know Doctor Latham's meaning for the word idea. Here was the key-word. Without under- standing it, it must be hard to understand Idealist. 64 The New Word I looked, again, and found an explanation as short as the other had been long. " Idea mental image." Good. But the word image is sometimes used in a loose sense by poets. To make more sure I turned it up. " Image Any corporeal representation : generally used of statues." This time there could be no doubt. The image was not a metaphor, it was a thing of stone and marble. Yet I was struck by the curious result of adding this explanation to the last one. Idea = mental image. Image = corporeal representation. Idea = mental corporeal representation. Mental-corporeal ? The words seemed to unsay each other. It was like what the logicians call a contradiction in terms. In order to be fair to Doc- tor Latham I went to the word representation. " Representation. Image, likeness." The reappearance of the image so soon was dis- concerting. It seemed to dog the lexicographer like the Commander's statue in Don Juan. His last two explanations worked out thus : Image =any corporeal representation. Representation = image. Image = any corporeal image. This time it was not an unsaying, but a saying over again, like what the logicians call an identical pro- position. The Play upon Words 65 Meanwhile, instead of getting nearer to the meaning of idea, Doctor Latham seemed to be going round and round it. He seemed like a squirrel trying to climb up in a revolving cage ; the cage goes round, but the squirrel gets no higher. I began to see there might be books in which the words went round and round, but the author got no further, books not altogether outside the scope of this enquiry. It was all very well to say that the stones and trees were only representations in the mind, but if there were no stones and trees, what did the representations represent ? In order to give Doctor Latham every chance, I followed him to the word mind. Here was a word which he confessed to be of Eng- lish growth, no doubt because it happens to be found in some old English book, where it is spelt gemynd. It is indeed a folk word, and almost a cry. " Mind what you do ! " " I have a great mind to ! " " He is out of his mind ! " all these are utterances heard every day. Such a word should be a fair test for a professor of the English language. Doctor Latham explained it in this manner : "Mind. 1. Intelligent power. 2. Intellectual capa- city. 3. Liking ; choice ; inclination ; propension ; affection. 4. Quality ; disposition. 5. Thoughts ; sentiments. 6. Opinion. 7. Memory ; remembrance ; recollection." I sought further light from two more entries. " Intellectual. Relating to the understanding." " Understanding. Intellectual powers." 66 The New Word It was another recurring decimal in words. Intel- lectual meant relating to the intellectual powers. And yet understanding is one of those words that explain themselves. Like the Swedish forsta, which is still found in some parts of England as forestand, it tells its own story. A picture of Leighton's shows it to the eye. A man is teaching a boy the use of the bow. He leans over the boy from behind, grasp- ing the boy's hands in his, and guiding them while the bow is drawn. That boy is understanding how to draw a bow. When we have got as far as that we need go no further. We have got to the mixture. Words of this kind are on the same footing as the names of things outside us. They are the names of actions, I will call them play words. When we have seen the play, the word has served its office. One more example of lexicography and I must leave Doctor Latham swimming round and round for ever in his Mediterranean maelstrom. One of his explanations of mind was thoughts. And this was his explanation of thought. " Thought. Operation of the mind ; idea ; image formed in the mind." And so at the end of my effort to learn from him the meaning of the word idea, he had brought me back to the starting point. I put the two last explanations together, and they gave me an equation, the like of which perhaps is not in human language. Mind = thoughts. The Play upon Words 67 Thought =image formed in the mind. Mind = images formed in the images formed in the images formed in the * III It is time to return to the doctrine of Idealism. " The stones and trees of the outside world are themselves, less on the strength of any stuff of their own than through the play of the mind, in which they stand forth as " (recurring decimal). That is to say, the stones and trees outside us are not really outside us, but inside us. They are not things, but thoughts. A wit has put it still more comprehensively, " The universe is a thought, and I am thinking it." This doctrine, or this play upon words, was in- vented by Bishop Berkeley in order to confound the atheists, a class of men who may be suspected of being what they are, less on the strength of any materialism of their own than through the working of the reverent mind, in which they exist as bogeys. It is impossible to refuse to Berkeley the admiration due to the man who has said the last word in his own department. His doctrine is the perfection of metaphysics, if it be not a parody on metaphysics. 68 The New Word Nobody has ever refuted it ; and nobody has ever believed it. Berkeley himself of course did not believe it, be- cause it is evidently an invented pantheism, with oneself as the creator ; and Berkeley was a deeply religious man. There is no record of any atheist who was ever confounded by it. And that is the only point which we have to consider. We are freed, by the words of the Will, from in- quiring whether this language, or other language like it, is true or false. We have to ask the easier, but much more searching, question, does it materially benefit mankind ? Every work that runs counter to our settled habits of thought and speech, driving us to weigh the mean- ings of our words, and question the soundness of our views, is of benefit to mankind, in so far as it tends to break up those lumps and knots in the mind which are called prejudices, and which hinder us from thinking and speaking truly. In so far as Berkeley's book did that, or does that, it is a good book. But apart from that it seems to have no tendency whatever. It is like the famous English Act of Parliament the only effect of which was to add three words to every conveyance. An idealist, in Doctor Latham's sense of the word, instead of saying to his gardener, " Gardener, plant that rose-tree in this bed," would have to say, " Perception of a gardener, plant that perception of a rose-tree in this perception of a bed." The doctrine leaves us where it found us. If some of our thoughts pretend to be stones and trees, and are called stones and trees The Play upon Words 69 in consequence, how can it benefit mankind to call them anything else ? The question is whether this doctrine has borne fruits. Who has believed it, and been the better for believing it ? Berkeley himself refused to be translated from a poor bishoprick to a rich one. If he had been asked if this was because he did not believe in the existence of Matter, he would have answered no, but because he believed in the Gospel. There is an older doctrine of which this idealism seems to be the insubstantial ghost. A greater than Berkeley once taught that all the material world was illusion Maya. But in the mouth of the Buddha, that teaching was not a clever paradox ; it was a living truth by seizing on which men might win their way out of sorrow. It was not a metaphysical doc- trine, but a practical rule of behaviour ; Set not thy heart on the things of this world, for they are vain. And yet I am not sure that the teaching of the Buddha was of an idealist tendency, within the mean- ing of this Will. IV Latham, one sees, has faithfully explained the word Idealism, as a technical term in use among meta- physicians and moral philosophers. That the word 70 The New Word stood for anything beside the mock scepticism of Berkeley ; that it had passed into common use with a meaning almost the opposite of scepticism ; he evidently did not know. Indeed, as we have seen, he had never met with it as an adjective at all. What is more strange is that he should have over- looked an older sort of Idealism, familiar in meta- physical and moral-philosophical writing long before Berkeley's day ; the Idealism of Plato, the father of all such as work in metaphysics, and patentee of the metaphysical Idea. There are two Platos ; one the companion of Socrates, walking in the market-place with his master, and showing us as in a stage play how the great truth-seeker pierced his way through cunning webs of words ; the other the teacher in the Academy, weaving his own webs, and decorating them with his master's name. It is to the second Plato that we owe the doctrine of Ideas. Let me see if I can state it in words as homely as those of Socrates. The doctrine of the first Plato, the verihood under- lying the early dialogues, which they lead towards, even if they do not openly declare it, comes to this. We give expression to our likes and dislikes by such words as nice, nasty, good and evil. When we write such words a little differently, as Niceness, Nastiness, The Good and The Evil, we do not change their nature because we have changed their spelling. They have not ceased to be the names of our own feelings, and become something else, merely because we want to use them as nouns instead of adjectives. We have 7 1 not created a mixture by creating a name. The words in their new shape are shorthand words, by whose use we can say what we want to say more quickly. By The Good we mean that which all men deem good, or rather that which we think all men ought to deem good, for a wise old saw reminds us that one man's meat is another man's poison ; and so we find that all men do not worship the same God. The doctrine of the second Plato is the first doc- trine read backwards, as the Devil-worshippers used to read the Lord's Prayer. It is that the adjectives come from the nouns, and not the nouns from the adjectives. Niceness and Nastiness, The Good and The Evil, are not the names of thoughts inside us, but of thoughts outside us ; perhaps the Thoughts of an eternal Thinker, of which our thoughts are copies. Here is at least an Idealism of a more Idealist tendency than Berkeley's. Perhaps, were Plato writing now, he could not fairly be refused the Nobel Prize. Tried by the test of ontology however, his teaching is imperfect. For the electric current in- duced by a Current outside, goes the other way. And so we find the real Thoughts outside us stir up thoughts within us not in sympathy, but in anta- gonism. The cruelty of Nature teaches us, not to be cruel, but to be kind. Her carelessness makes us careful. Her hardship leads us towards luxury. Her riddles give birth to our science. And so through- out life necessity answers to necessity. The Picts draw their conversion on themselves. The king is man's reply to anarchy ; Christianity is his reply to Caesar ; peace is his reply to war ; the Idealist is his 72 The New Word reply to Materialism. He turns leaf after leaf of the great Lesson-Book, and the word Finis is not on any one. There is another test, and a very practical and memorable test, under which Plato breaks down. In the year 1474 a remarkable sight was to be seen in all the public libraries of France ; the sight of books in chains. A controversy had been carried on between two parties, calling themselves Nominal- ists and Realists, and now the writings of the Nominal- ists had been placed in iron chains by order of King Louis XI, at the bidding of Pope John XXIII, to keep them out of the hands of the young student. It seems to me that there can be no much better test than that, of whether a work is of an idealist tendency. When I see a book in chains, and when I know that the chains have been placed on it by a king at the bidding of a pope, that is enough for me. I do not need to open it to be sure that it is worthy of the Nobel Prize. And what was it that these fettered books taught ? What was the heresy of the Nominalists ? It was that of Socrates over again in another form. It was that names are not things ; that shorthand does not say The Play upon Words 73 more than longhand, that when, instead of thinking of men one by one, you think of all of them at once, and call your thought humanity, you have merely added a new word to the dictionary, and not a new thing to the contents of the universe. H Such was the doctrine that alarmed a Roman Pope, and not without good reason ; for the Nominalists of that generation became the Reformers of the next. Nor is Pope John XXIII yet dead, neither have all the chains yet been taken off. I have myself found the very harmless essays of the late Professor Huxley under lock and key in a so-called Free Library. Judged by this test a work of an idealist tendency must be a work that some one will want to put in iron chains. FIFTH HEAD THE HOUSE OF CARDS Metaphysics. i. Direction to the Binder. 2. Hoax of Andronicus Rhodius. 3. The Magic Song. 4. Pure Reason and Practical Reason. 5. The Annex of the Universe. T DEALISM, as defined by the dictionary, the Ideal- J. ism of the schools, the Idealism that is spelt with a capital I, is a system of metaphysical philosophy. Those are the words with which Latham begins his explanation. And the issue that they raise is one that cannot be escaped. Did the Testator use the word idealist in the technical sense of the school- men ? Did he intend this Prize for systems of meta- physical philosophy ? Berkeleyism did not end with Berkeley. His doc- trine, or his language, was taken up by greater men. It was the greatest of them, Kant, who really stamped the word Idealism with this sense, and gave it cur- rency. Since his time the term has almost replaced the word metaphysical. Among modern metaphysi- cians, Idealism is your only wear. I have already said that Nobel's bequest seems to me a challenge to this sort of idealism, that is to say, a challenge to the science or mystery of Meta- 74 The House of Cards 75 physics. Brought face to face with this word in Doctor Latham's explanation of idealism, I felt I had no choice but to examine it. I approached this famous word with not a little dread, arising partly from my want of skill in Medi- terranean languages, and partly from a well-known incident in its recent history. In the last century there was formed in London a private debating club under the name of the Meta- physical Society. Its members were some of the ablest men of their generation, Tennyson the poet, Gladstone the statesman, Spencer the philosopher, Manning the churchman, Huxley the scientist. These distinguished men met and talked together for ten years, and at the end of that time they broke up the society, because, as one of them said, they had not yet agreed on the meaning of the word meta- physics. I was not rash enough to hope I could succeed where such distinguished men had failed, but I was happy in the knowledge that I had not so hard a task as theirs. They had sought for a definition of metaphysics ; I wanted merely a working sense, a sense that would enable me to judge if a meta- physical work came within the meaning of the Testator. 7 6 The New Word The word was Greek to all appearance, but, like idealist, it turned out to be one of those Greek words which the Greeks themselves were never fortunate enough to know. In the lexicon I could find only its two pieces, meta and phusikos. Phusikos did not seem a word hard to translate. Natural, native, begotten, born, such were the mean- ings offered me by the Greek lexicon. But meta, on the other hand, proved to have the most variable meanings of any word I have ever met. It meant al- most everything from inside to outside. With nothing but the Greek words to help me I might have groped for ever for the meaning of metaphysics among words like supernatural and unnatural, afterbirth and unborn. I do not know how far it is the case in other lan- guages, but in English, words like physical, ma- terial, real, natural and sensible all ring well ; they suggest the true and useful. Whereas words like immaterial, unreal, unnatural and senseless all ring badly ; they suggest the false and foolish. The prejudice against the study of metaphysics in Eng- land attaches to the very name of the science, which is, as nearly as I could make out, in the vulgar tongue nonsense. I was obliged to go once more to Doctor Latham, this time with the most encouraging result. For after explaining the word as " ontology, or the science of the affections of being in general," and adding that the science in question was generally branded as an impossible one, he showed me that metaphysics is one of the few words whose beginning is known. The House of Cards 77 I shall have written most of the foregoing pages in vain if there is any need for me to insist on the difference this made to me. That the word was a Babu formation would matter no more than it had mattered in the case of dynamite, as soon as I could come to the mixture. I quote Doctor Latham's authority, a distinguished writer on metaphysics, named Mansel. " The term metaphysics, though originally em- ployed to designate a treatise of Aristotle, was prob- ably unknown to the philosopher himself. On the whole the weight of evidence appears to be in favour of the supposition which attributes the inscription ta meta ta phttsika to Andronicus Rhodius, the first editor of Aristotle's collected works." Andronicus Rhodius, it appears, like Columbus, added a new continent to the realms of knowledge by accident. " The title, as given to the writings on the first philosophy, probably indicates only their place in the collection, as coming after the physical treatises of the author." And thus we see the word came into being as a direction to the binder. The question is whether it has ever become anything more ? The New Word II Among the wonderful beliefs of those old heathen men who, guessing where we count and measure, prophesied of all the lore to come, is none more won- derful than that which shines through the magic song of the Finns, the belief in the creative power of the uttered word. What else is the story of Andronikos of Rhodes ? He uttered, all unwit- tingly, his wizard spell ; and lo ! Professors of Meta- physics in all the Roman universities of Europe and America. What, then, is the mixture of which Aristotle's editor furnished only the name ? What is it that the professors have been professing for two thousand years ? If I turn for an answer to this question to a popular work of reference, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I find that the official teachers of the science of An- dronicus Rhodius have been no more able to agree among themselves than the members of the Meta- physical Society. The history of metaphysics is the history of the attempt to supply a mixture to fit the name. The enchanted squirrels have toiled in the sorcerer's cage. They have written whole learned libraries ; the Mediterranean words have gone round and round in imposing procession ; but the writers have not gained an inch. The House of Cards 79 in Wherein lies the mesmeric power of these Babu words ? It is in sheer repetition. By dint of saying them over and over again we make ourselves believe in them. Repetition is the secret of all enchant- ment. We find it in the magic spells buried beneath the dust of Akkad. We meet it in the lullaby that puts the child to sleep. The learned Latham can suggest no parent for the word lull. No doubt the monks forgot to latinise it ; it does not happen to be found in any Anglo- Saxon manuscript. Meanwhile it is a word whose roots go down into the deepest soil of speech. It is, of course, the Swedish lulla, laulu, the Finland word for song. It is of kin to the word lay, also a song. It looks at us out of the Roman legend. The Greek word lego meant to lull to sleep. It hides in words like logic and religion, nay, in lexicography ! It is the core of the word language. Perhaps it is the oldest and most widespread word that men have ever framed their lips to say. There is only one way to break the spell, and that is to stop the magic song. We must interrupt the Mediterranean sorcerer, and ask him what he is say- ing. We must translate the Babu words. One thing is clear already about the word meta- 8o The New Word physics. The prime enchanter, Andronicus Rhodius, used meta in the sense of after, and not among. If physics be the science of nature, then metaphysics should be the science of whatever is outside nature. And so, indeed, the long toil of the metaphysicians has been a struggle to get out of the natural world, by getting inside themselves. And inside themselves they have found what they call The Mind, and in this very mind they have found the objects of the external world, the stones and trees, in short, nature all over again. IV Now there is a real science of mind. The study of how men think and reason may be called the crown- ing study, the last word in any education worth the name, the last chapter of any but a parrot's grammar- book. But just because it is the crowning study it must rest on all the others. It is as natural as they are. And like them it must follow Bacon's rule Learn from the things, and not from the words about the things. I have likened the mind to a tree whose roots are feelings and whose leaves are words. The followers of Andronicus Rhodius have tried to learn about it only from the leaves. They have considered the mind as a cut flower, picked from somewhere outside the The House of Cards 81 universe, and stuck inside us. They have studied only the leaves, and so they have not thoroughly understood even the leaves. They have used short- hand by mistake for longhand. They have dealt in names to which there were no mixtures. The last great name among the slaves of this en- chantment, the last great fore-Darwinian thinker, is Kant. His admirers tell us that the grand character- istic of his philosophy is his distinction between the Understanding and the Reason Ver -stand and Ver- nunft. Reason discerns truth itself, Absolute Truth, while Understanding discerns only relations, Relative Truth. Understanding is confined to material know- ledge, and the practical issues of daily life ; and it breaks down in the attempt to prove there is a God. That is a task reserved for Reason, which alone is able to deal with spiritual things. Here, then, we have the Andronican science at its best ; this is the grand result of studying the mind upside down. Let us see what the words mean. I will not be too curious about the German, though I have my own doubts as to whether Vernunft has anything to do with Reason. With the Dutch, who spell it vernuft, it stands for wit, skill, genius ; while one of my Swedish word-books translates Reason by both of Kant's words fornuft and forstand. The English words are fortunately as plain as words can be. We have seen already that under- standing is simply a closer kind of watching ; it is to learn by following what is going on, and so keep- ing it in mind. Reason is a book word, it is the French raison, the Latin ratio. But it is only a 82 The New Word glorified counting. The folk word for it is reckoning, the Swedish rakning. What Andronican science has achieved has been to exchange the meanings of these plain words. It is Understanding that discerns things by themselves, and Reason" that discerns relations, or, in homelier words, putsftwo and two together. Shall I confess that I think both words are better used by a forgotten poet writing on the immortality of the soul : " When she rates things, and moves from ground to ground, The name of reason she obtains by this : But when by reason she the truth hath found. And standeth fast, she understanding is." Here is a writer who has stopped to ask himself the meaning of the words he used. He does not talk as though reason were one thing, and under- standing another independent thing. He sees that both are only names for the same inner power, called reason while she does her sum, and understanding while she sets down the amount. And after all, it was Kant who called in Practical Reason to do the very thing that the poor practical Understanding was forbidden to do, and the Pure Reason had failed to do, namely to prove there is a God. The fool who said in his heart, There is no God, would have felt proud if he had lived to read the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. The House of Cards 83 V In our time it has become plain that all that kind of thing must go to the scrap-heap whither Des- cartes and Bacon swept the rubbish of the medieval schoolmen. Today, if we wish to learn anything about the mind, we begin by looking at the brain ; we interpret words by feelings, and feelings by words ; we watch the savage and the child as they begin to think and talk ; we follow what is going on in nature, instead of trying to turn our backs on it ; and so we make some little headway. But we no longer call that study metaphysics. We call it Mind-lore, or, in Babu, Psychology. For my part I have never been constrained to enter this revolving cage. I have a talisman that shivers the enchanted weapons. It is my ignorance of the Babu tongue. As soon as I look at the An- dronican hieroglyphs they change their shapes, and shrink down into the poor common words of daily life. That sublime pair of twins, subjective and objective, dwindle down to inside and outside ; that mysterious consciousness shrivels into mere wakeful- ness ; that pompous Ego is nothing better than my- self, and so the glittering Aladdin's palace melts before my eyes And like an unsubstantial pageant faded, Leaves not a rack behind." 84 The New Word In the town of St. Malo in Bretagne I have seen a hotel called UUnivers, and over against it a build- ing with the sign Annexe de rUnivers. I know the architect of that building. His name is Andronikos of Rhodes. SIXTH HEAD THE FACE IN THE LOOKING-GLASS Public Opinion. i. A Disciple of Tolstoy. 2. Strong Language about Humanity. 3. Brotherhood and Bombs. 4. Man his own God. AS soon as I found that I could not learn the meaning of the Testator's word from lexicons, I did what the lexicographer had been too proud to do ; I went out into the street to find out how the word was being used from day to day. I questioned men of many divers minds and occupa- tions, I questioned the poet, the lawyer and the journalist, and from no two did I receive the same explanation. Some answered readily, others hesitat- ingly, but only one was wise enough to use the words " I do not know." In the light that we have gained already it will be worth while to look again at these replies. And I have not invented them. " Something to do with the imaginative powers." " Fanatical." " Altruistic." " Not practical." " Exact." " Poetical." 85 86 The New Word " Intangible." * Sentimental." " True." " That which cannot be proved." " The opposite to materialistic." The only one who showed confidence in his answer was the altruist. Partly on that account, and partly because I had heard of altruism before, and did not know that it might not be what the Testator had in mind, I set myself to look into this word. It must not be supposed that the friend who gave me this explanation was one of those ignorant fanatics who mask their envy of the rich under high sounding words like Humanity and Brotherhood. My friend was a man of education, in the front rank of his profession as a barrister, with every prospect of becoming a judge. He had a house in a good London square, and a villa on the Riviera ; he drove a car- riage and pair, and was a connoisseur in champagne and cigars. Evidently such a man had nothing to gain, and very much to lose, by embracing the religion of unselfishness ; so that I was able to learn from him as from one who was transparently sincere in his belief. I began by putting my question in a more practical form. The Face in the Looking-Glass 87 " Suppose I should wish to write a work of an idealist tendency, what would such a book have to be like, in your opinion ? " " I have told you. It must be of an altruistic tendency. It must preach unselfishness." Here was a word I could not quarrel with. If I do not understand the word self, I shall never under- stand any word. The ground was becoming firm under my feet. I said to my friend, " I want to be very clear. When you say that, you don't mean that I need write unselfishly, for instance, against my own opinions ? " My friend smiled good-naturedly. " Now you are quibbling. You know very well what I mean. You must write against greed and cruelty and lust against selfishness in every form." I felt a little disappointed. " I am afraid you will think me very stupid ; but do you mean that any book that writes against these things is altruistic ? " " Certainly," my friend said ; but it seemed to me that he did not say it as if he felt quite certain. " But, then, let me see if I understand you. I have never read any book that did not write against the things you speak of. The newspapers write against them every day. I have never seen any book that praised greed and cruelty and lust. Do you mean that all literature is of an idealistic ten- dency ? " My friend shook his head. " You go too fast. Altruism is a great principle, the principle that man is born to serve his fellow 88 The New Word men. The question is whether a book asserts that principle. Read Tolstoy's works, and you will under- stand what I mean. He is our greatest idealist to- day." This answer was all that I could have asked for. At last I had got from the name to the mixture. My friend had done what the Testator has failed to do, he had pointed out a work of an idealist ten- dency. The only question left was whether he had pointed out the right one. I tried to recall the tendency of Count Tolstoy's works. " You would say, then, that I must write against war ? and government ? and money ? and reli- gion ? " My friend had nodded his approval so far, but he stopped me at the word religion. " No, no ; it is the Religion of Humanity that Tolstoy preaches. The Service of Man. That is altruism." I considered this explanation carefully. " When you say that, do you mean to leave out the animals ? I have read a story of the Buddha giving a piece of his flesh to feed a starving tigress. Should you not call that altruism ? " " That is carrying the thing to absurdity. Tolstoy never does that. Man comes before the beasts." " All men ? Or do white men come before black men ? " This time my friend became eloquent. " All men. Once you begin to draw distinctions you will end in race-feeling, and the blatant militar- The Face in the Looking-Glass 89 ism of our own day. That is the very thing that Tolstoy fights against. He recognises no distinction between one man and another, from the Tsar on his throne to the lowest creature with the form of man." It was an ungrateful task to resist my friend's enthusiasm, but I ventured to put another question. " I am almost ashamed to ask ; but when you say ' no distinction,' perhaps you don't mean that Tolstoy draws no distinction between good men and bad ? " " Of course not. But he shows that we must love them all alike." The word love always sounds to me a little vague. I was obliged to press my friend still further. " Well, but suppose the Tsar were a bad man, who wanted to oppress the Russian people, would not Tolstoy be on their side rather than on his ? " " Certainly. Oppression is just what he is opposed to most, the oppression of one man by another, whether he be Tsar or peasant." " Then if the peasants should want to oppress anybody, Tolstoy would be opposed to them ? " " That is what I have said." " Then let me see if I follow you rightly. Sup- pose the peasants should cease paying taxes, and thereby throw the taxgatherers out of work, or refuse to fire on the enemy, and thereby expose their officers to disgrace and capture, would that be oppression ? " " No, because those classes have no moral right to do what they are doing. Their work does not benefit mankind." " But are not the taxgatherers and officers a part 90 The New Word of mankind ? Does not the Religion of Humanity require us to serve them ? " " Not in that way. You are confusing the princi- ple. Altruism is the service of man as a whole, not of any one class. If a particular class is doing harm instead of good, we ought not to support it. By doing so we should injure mankind." " I think I see what you mean. We ought to serve those who are serving mankind, rather than those who are injuring mankind ? " " Yes, that is the whole point." " By ' we * do you mean everybody ? All man- kind ?" " What else could I mean ? " " Then let me see if I have got it right. Altruism is the principle that mankind ought to serve those who are serving it, but not those who are not serv- ing it." " If you like to put it that way, yes." "It is the principle of the vulgar saying, ' You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours ' ? " My friend began to be a little vexed with me. " You do not seem to see the difference between the individual and Humanity. Humanity is a whole. We cannot divide it. Altruism is the service of the whole by the individual." I had to recall those books that were so highly dis- tinguished by Pope John XXIII. " But is not Humanity made up of individuals ? Does not the altruist have to serve men and women ? " " Yes, yes, of course ; but all of them. Not one more than another. The heart of the true altruist The Face in the Looking-Glass 91 overflows with love towards every creature, the lowest as well as the highest, the greatest criminal as well as the purest saint." " That is very beautiful. I think I quite under- stand that. But you told me that the altruist had not only to love these different kinds of people, but also to serve them. Is that right ? " " Of course. He cannot love them unless he serves them." " Very well ; then all I want to know is how he ought to serve them. Suppose an altruist should see a soldier or a taxgatherer beating a peasant, ought he to stop him, or not to stop him ? " " He ought to remonstrate with him." " But suppose the remonstrance has no effect. Ought he to do nothing more ? " " He can offer to take the beating in the other's place." " But suppose the soldier says he would rather go on beating the peasant ? " " Then he has done all he can." " Then an altruist ought not to use force ? " " No. Force is no remedy. That is Tolstoy's great lesson." " Then an altruist is one who will not use force, even to defend his money from thieves, or his children from cruelty ? " " That is the ideal." " And you, if any one should want to steal your money, or to beat your children, would think it wrong to prevent them ? " " In an ideal sense, yes." 92 The New Word " Even though you should know that the man who was beating your children was out of his mind ; or that he was a good man who had been hypnotised and made to do wicked things against his will ? " My friend laughed at me. " Now you are trying to make the principle absurd. The Religion of Humanity is reasonable. Every one recognises that a madman should be restrained from doing mischief, whether to himself or to others." " Then if a man went mad and wanted to beat you or your children, or to set fire to your house, or do any other wicked thing, you would think it right to restrain him by force ? " " Of course. That is a ridiculous question. It would be for the good of the man himself to restrain him." " But if he were not mad ; if he were only eccentric, or were behaving like that out of superstition, or spite, you would think it wrong to restrain him by force ? " " All that is a question of degree. The test is a very simple one ; does the man know what he is doing ? " " Then let me see if I have got it right this time. You mean that if a man is doing wicked things by accident he ought to be prevented, but not if he is doing them on purpose ? And so an altruist is one who restrains good men, and lets wicked men do what they like." " That," said my friend, " is not putting it fairly. I said that madmen ought to be restrained for their own sake. Surely you ought to be able to see the The Face in the Looking- Glass 93 difference. When we restrain a man for his own good we are serving him. Our action is altruistic." " I think I see what you mean, this time. It is doing good to a madman to save him from doing wicked things which he might afterwards regret ? " My friend smiled, well pleased. " Exactly ! Now you understand me." " But it is not doing good to a man in his right mind to save him from doing wicked things which he might afterwards regret." My friend's face fell. " No man who wants to do wicked things is really in his right mind," he said. " Tolstoy has said so over and over again." " Then I am afraid I don't understand you," I had to confess. " I thought you began by saying that the altruist ought not to use force to anybody, and now you seem to be saying that he ought to use force to everybody who is doing what the altruist thinks is wrong." " All that," said my friend, " comes of pushing the principle to extremes. Altruism is an ideal" I was obliged to shake my head regretfully. " I came here to ask you the meaning of the word idealistic," I remarked, " and you told me that it meant altruistic. But now in explaining to me what altruism is, you have three times used the word ideal, and each time in the sense of a foolish extreme to which a good principle ought not to be carried. And altruism itself, as you have explained it, seems to me just such a foolish extreme to which the old- fashioned principle of kindness, or good will towards 94 The New Word men, ought not to be carried. I am afraid that what you have been really telling me all this time is that an idealist work must be a work of an extravagant tendency." II The Religion of Humanity is being preached among us to-day by many well-meaning men and women, who unfortunately have never stopped to ask them- selves what they mean by the words Religion and Humanity. No one, I think, now remembers the meaning of the word religion ; and I shall have to look for it hereafter. Humanity, of course, is the Babu for Man. It used to be written man, and old-fashioned writers had some rather plain things to say about it. " All men are liars." " There is none that doeth good, no, not one." " The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." " It repented the Lord that he had made man." No one would dare to say such things as that about Humanity. For Humanity no words can be too good. The dif- ference is as great as that between a little girl being scolded by her teacher in the schoolroom, when there is no one by, and the same little girl being praised by the teacher in the parlour, when visitors are present. The reason for the change is not far to seek. Those The Face in the Looking-Glass 95 well-meaning men and women have found out that the language of the theologians is bad language ; that the word of God has become an Andronican word to them ; and so, being too honest to go on using a word they do not understand, they have crossed it out, and looked for another word to write in its place. And obeying a natural law of the mind, which the theologians call anthropomorphism, they have written the word Man. I once knew a boy of fourteen who made the same discovery, and went through all his childish poems, crossing out the word God wherever it occurred ; and he, too, wrote words like Man and The People in its place. In this way they have changed the idol, but, as so often happens, they have not changed the idolatry. All the Andronican words of the theologians have come back again, only this time they are written about Man instead of about God. All the rich, com- fortable folks who used to go to church and call them- selves miserable sinners, now go to lecture halls and call themselves Lovers of Humanity. I think a Lover of Humanity is the very last person to whom, if I were in distress, I should go to borrow a five-pound note. Ill Humanity is a deceitful word, because they who use it are apt, like Pope John XXIII, and like my 9 6 The New Word altruistic friend, to forget that it is only a short way of saying men and women. And like most other words of the same class, it is a dangerous word, be- cause it puts the mind to sleep, and steels those who use it to do all kinds of cruel things they would other- wise be ashamed to do. In this word Rousseau sowed the seed that sprang up in the Reign of Terror. It is like that word Brotherhood, on behalf of which so many bombs have been thrown. In the course of my life I have come across a good many men and women styling themselves Socialists, Anarchists, Friends of Humanity, and what not, and I am sorry to say that I have found in practice that the more of these sort of words they used, and the bigger capitals they spelled them with, the more likely they were to be narrow-minded, bad-tempered people, quarrelling violently among themselves, and yet ready to turn and rend everybody else for not agree- ing with the things which they were not yet agreed upon among themselves. It has been my lot to talk with Apostles of Humanity, with the kind of men who get up Pilgrimages of Peace and Purity Crusades. (Fancy a man who does not know the difference between a pilgrim and a crusader talking about Humanity !) And when I have ventured to urge upon them mercy towards their victims, I have seen them foam at the mouth. I distrust Humanity when it foams at the mouth. The word Humanity is an Andronican word, be- cause it does not advance us an inch. Every one is agreed that it is doing a kindness to save a man who is not in his right mind from doing wicked things The Face in the Looking-Glass 97 which he might afterwards regret. The questions that remain are these : What things are wicked ; and who is to be the judge ; when is a man not in his right mind ; and who is to be the judge ; how, or with how much force, are we to save him ; and who is to be the judge ; and when, and under what circumstances, is it our business to step hi ; and again who is to be the judge ? These are questions that the wisest man who ever lived could not answer offhand, nor beforehand ; and the man who thinks he can answer them, and has answered them, by shouting the word Humanity, is more out of his mind, and more in need of restraint, than any soldier or taxgatherer or tsar. The moment a question becomes one of degree it is time for enthusiasm to call in wisdom. The mistake of my altruistic friend was in leaving wisdom out of his explanation. And it so happens that wisdom has the same imaginary Aryan root as Idealism. Humanity is a false word because, as we have seen, it means that there are, or ought to be, no differences between men. It means, for instance, that there is no difference between white men and black, and that if, in any place where they are living side by side, there happen to be more blacks than whites, the blacks ought to rule the whites. That falsehood is enshrined in the political creed of North America. It has cost the Americans a hundred thousand lives. It is still costing them crimes as frightful as the word Catholic cost Europe. And the same men who say that black men ought to rule over white men in the Carolinas will not let a yellow child sit in the same schoolroom with a white child in San Francisco, 9.8 The New Word IV Humanity is least of all an altruistic word. The Religion of Humanity pretends to be the worship of men and women by men and women. And it is not even that. Because the idolaters have an ideal man or woman whom they really worship. That idol is their own reflection in the looking-glass, and hence their Service of Humanity is apt to mean an effort to make Man in their own image. So far as I have been able to learn by watching what they do, instead of listening to what they say, their idol is very much like a Unitarian minister ; a man of some information, and of some taste in the arts ; firmly respectful of the inherited tabus of Europe, with leanings towards teetotalism and vegetarianism ; abounding in Mediterranean words of an immaterial tendency ; with not much sense of humour, and still less of his own infirmities ; and with rather a strong sense of the infirmities of others, and a strong disposition to make them better from his point of view, and worse from their point of view. Now this may be the Coming Man. This idol may be destined to grow up and overshadow the world. I do not say that it is a bad idol. Only do not let us call it Humanity. If the whole earth is to be ruled smooth in its name ; if all the men and women it now holds, from the five hundred millions of Chinese The Face in the Looking-Glass 99 down to the dwarfs who haunt beyond the Moun- tains of the Moon, are to be ground beneath the car of this new Juggernath, let us know what we are doing ; and do not let us use the word Humanity. The trees of the forest are not all alike, neither are the stars in heaven. As there is one beauty of the violet, and another beauty of the rose, so there is one manhood of the North, and another manhood of the South, one manhood of the tsar and another manhood of the peasant, one manhood of the money- maker and another manhood of the artist. The most inhuman, because the most false, words ever spoken about man are the words " normal man." For man himself is an abnormal beast. Is it for the benefit of mankind that man should be his own God ? That is the question which has to be answered yes or no. The Religion of Humanity is not the worship of the best man, nor of the best in man. It is the wor- ship of the middling man. It is the consecration of that instinct which causes men to kill to their own loss the best man, to starve the poet and to stone the prophet, to scourge and crucify the Christ. How can such worship be idealistic ? It is the least idealistic of any. It is the denial of worship, the denial of verihood, and the denial of hope. SEVENTH HEAD THE SHAPE The Counter-Spell. i. A Work of a Materialist Tendency. 2. Athanasian Language. 3. Inventory of the Universe. 4. An Idealistic Word. I WENT on asking every one I met his meaning for the word Idealist, till in the end I came to a wise man who answered, " I don't know. I should have thought that ideal was the opposite to mate- rial." Every one else had tried to explain idealism by itself. This was the first attempt to explain it beside something else. The Babu terms, of course, are Ab- solute and Relative, meaning, as far as I can make out, Untied and Sideways. As soon as I had this answer I felt sure it was a clew that would lead me out of the labyrinth. The word Sideways I had long since found to be an amulet of strange power against the sorcerers, including those diviners who now write themselves divines. When I was rather young indeed, before I had learned to translate these Mediterranean words I was once taken by a Mediterranean-minded friend to be en- chanted by a learned and affable diviner of the Society of Jesus. The magician began, using the wisdom of the serpent, by drawing from me that I had been 100 The Shape 101 brought up in the communion called the Plymouth Brethren, whose peculiar tenets|he*seemed disposed to handle in a spirit of urbane mockery. On my avowing that I had not come to defend those tenets, nor any others, but rather to learn from him, we insensibly changed ground, and, passing from depth to depth, we rested on the discovery that for my courteous entertainer truth was Absolute, while for me it was Relative. There being no oubliette avail- able, I was then suffered to depart unhurt. It was like that story in the Thousand Nights and a Night, the most wonderful story in the world, in which a princess skilled in the magical art enters into mortal combat with a djinn. The djinn changes by turns into a wolf, a fish and a pomegranate seed ; and the princess pursues him as a dog, a serpent and a cock ; till at the last the djinn is driven to assume his fiery shape, and the two antagonists ap- pear fighting in the air with flames. The wise man's answer was the one towards which I had been groping my way all along, the answer towards which all the other answers pointed more or less distinctly. The great word of Andronicus Rhodius itself might be translated Anti-Material. A work of an idealist tendency I could doubt no longer must be one that looked Materialism in the face. What then was Materialism ? 102 The New Word It was with a curious feeling of relief that I ex- changed the old question for the new. I felt that I should now be on firm ground. I was about to pass out of the enchanted wood of words into the open field of things. I had been vexed for some time by a gathering suspicion that Materialism must be common sense and Idealism must be nonsense ; that one must be true, and the other false. I even began to fear that the well-meaning folk who call themselves Idealists were at heart Materialists, mak- ing-believe to believe in Idealism, because they wished it were true. The Materialists I envied as men who walked by sight and not by faith, and had no need of make-belief. But, now, where was this common sense teaching to be found ? Where was it set out in sensible words, and not in Andronican ciphers ? I sought out a cunning bookseller, and put the question. " I want a little book of a Materialist tendency." The bookseller looked ever so slightly startled. " Do you mean a book attacking religion ? " he asked me. I was rather taken aback. " No, no ; I don't want a controversial book. I want a book that will give me in a short and simple The Shape 103 fashion the Materialist view of life. The sort of book that could be put into the hands of a school- boy." " I am afraid I don't know of any such book," said the bookseller. I was very much put out. " What," I said, " is there no book which tells a child something about the world in which he finds himself ? When I was a child I read a book that told me ' In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' Now I am told that is only poetry ; and I want to know the facts." The bookseller thought for a moment, and then brightened up. " I think I have the very book you require, The Story of Creation." This was a good hearing. The name of the book assured me that it had been written to meet the need I felt. I asked for a copy. " I ought to tell you that we consider it a little advanced," the bookseller observed cautiously, as he handed me the book. " By ' advanced,' you mean ? " " A little outspoken." " Outspoken ! But that is just what I am looking for, struggling for. My trouble is that I cannot find any book that is outspoken enough. You speak as if that were some fault in a book ! " " Well, of course, we have to deal .with all classes ; and we find that some people object to a book if it speaks too plainly. They are a little afraid of Mate- rialism, we find." 104 The New Word " By afraid, do you mean they are afraid that it is true, or afraid that it is false ? " The bookseller hesitated. " Well, I suppose of course, I can't say but I should think they were afraid that it might unsettle their views." " True views, do you mean ; or false views ? " The bookseller shook his head. " I don't ask them that. Our business is to sell people what books we think they will like, without inquiring about their views ? " " But how can you tell what books they will like, unless you know their views ? " The bookseller smiled. " In our business we can generally tell pretty soon what sort of books people will like." I saw that I was talking with an able man. I could not refrain from asking him the riddle. " What sort of book, should you say, was a work of an idealist tendency ? " My bookseller frowned thoughtfully. Then he slowly shook his head. " I could hardly tell you that, sir. We don't stock many books of that kind. There is no demand for them. People don't much care about idealism in these days. They like something of a practical tendency." And so I had got yet another meaning for the Testator's word. The Shape 105 II Rightly to tell the parable of science, to put the story of creation into better words than those which have satisfied a hundred generations, were surely as great a task as man could set himself. This were indeed a work of an idealist tendency. In what high mood, after what prayers and strivings, with what fear and joy, dare any man sit down to write the first chapter of the new Book of Life ? It was with thoughts like these, and with, I hope, an open mind, that I began to read the Story of Creation. The learned and distinguished author writes as a priest of what he calls the Theory of Evolution. His motive is wholly praiseworthy, for he says in his preface that " complete expositions of the theory are only to be found in bulky volumes with which few readers have the time and courage to grapple." No state of things could be graver and more regret- table. For in so far as the theory is a true inter- pretation of life it must behove every living man to do his best to master it. This, then, is a book for the beginner ; and if I am rightly informed it has been, and is still being, widely read as such. To the beginner the author declares his purpose is to give " a clear idea of the mecha- nism of the universe." It disappointed me to find already that Materialism could not get on without 106 The New Word the word idea, with which few beginners have the time and courage to grapple. Nor was it less dis- couraging to learn that, even for the Materialist, there are several " abiding mysteries in the universe," such as the nebula, the crystal, and the cell. Much more disconcerting was it to be told that of the beginnings, and even " of the things themselves " (those objects of the external world !) " nothing can be known." I might have been reading the Athanasian Creed. There were further disappointments of the same kind in store for me. Almost in his next sentence I found the writer calling the things themselves " ma- terial phenomena." Of thought and emotion, he added, no material qualities could be predicated. And lastly my teacher with a single sentence laid the whole material world round me in ruin : " We can- not make the passage from chemistry to conscious- ness." When I had read thus far I seriously feared that I had been imposed upon, and that the Story of Creation was a satire on Materialism, written by one who was secretly a disciple of Andronikos of Rhodes. I had despaired of Materialism too soon, however. All this was but the introductory chapter, a feature dispensed with in the work which this one is de- signed to supersede. On the next page the Story of Creation began in earnest, with the impressive heading, " The Universe : Its Contents." There seems to be some contradiction between the author's word Universe, and his other word Evolu- The Shape 107 tion. Universe is the Babu way of writing One ward, whereas there is authority for saying that Evolution is the transformation of an indefinite homogeneity into a definite heterogeneity, or, as it may be put in English, one turning into many, rather than many into one. It is dangerous to use that other learned name Kosmos, which is to say, Order, because whether the world is orderly is still an open question. One eminent divine found it so orderly that it showed itself to be the handiwork of God ; another found it so disorderly that it showed itself to be in a state of alienation from God. The latter opinion seems to be the orthodox one among Materialists of all denominations. On this head the words of Huxley are as the words of Newman. There is a consensus of opinion that the universe is ill-behaved. They only differ as to what the well-behaved man had better do in the circumstances. The cardinal advises him to go to sleep and dream of a universe more to his liking. The professor advises him to stand no nonsense from the universe, but to correct it. " Pull me down these riotous woodlands," he seems to say, " and build me a rectangular boulevard patrolled by the police ; destroy me this shameless dell with all its moss and wild-flowers, and give me in its place a square garden adorned with iron rails and carpet bedding, and a notice forbidding children to run over the grass." World is the old English name, but it is the name for an old universe, when our earth stood fast in the middle, and all the stars went round it. I shall feel safer if I write All-Thing or Everything. io8 The New Word in " The Universe is made up of Matter and Power." This sentence assured me that the Story of Creation was the work of a genuine Materialist. There is a habit of mind common to all Material- ists, by whatever name they may describe themselves. They may choose to be called Positivists or Agnost- ics, Scientists or Believers, Catholics or Secularists, but however much they may differ in details, their minds all work along certain lines or rules of thought like these : 1. It is easier for there to be shape without strength, than strength without shape. 2. It is easier for things not to be, than for them to be. 3. It is easier for things to keep still than for them to move. 4. It is easier to be dead than living. It is in obedience to this instinct that the author of the Story of Creation has made Matter the first item in his inventory of the All-Thing, and Power the second. An older story has it " In the begin- ning God." Matter, the author deems to be a word needing explanation ; and he explains it as a term for *' sub- stances that occupy space and affect the senses." The Shape 109 It is hard that a Materialist writer should be no more able to free himself from the meshes of Medi- terranean speech than Doctor Latham. Substance, I have reason to believe, is a high and mysterious word which plays a great part in the Andronican science. I confess I understand it less well than Matter ; and in so far as I do understand it its mean- ing is opposed somehow to that of the author's other Babu word, phenomena. Nay, is it not written in a treatise on Logic by no less a person than Doctor Latham himself, " It is, perhaps, unnecessary to say that substance, as used by logicians, has by no means the sense which so often attaches to it in ordinary conversation, viz., that of Matter or Body." My present business with the Story of Creation is not to find fault with its bad language, but, if I can, to pierce through the words to what the writer is really trying to say. But in a work on Materialism the word Matter is surely the one on which every- thing turns, and if so it is worth while to ask what it stands for. IV We know what answer to expect from lexicography. The words " What is the matter ? " are almost the first words an English child hears from its nurse. Doctor Latham sleepily murmurs that she is talking French or Latin ; she is trying to say matiere, or no The New Word materia. A mat is one of the commonest objects in every English cottage, as it was in every cave-dwel- ler's cave. Doctor Latham turns on his side, and mutters, " Roman Matta" The latest and best guesser hazards " Carthaginian." That a word spelt with two ta should come from a word spelt with one, and a word spelt with one t from a word spelt with two ; that four syllables should shrink to two, and two to one, makes no matter to exact philology. Still less does it matter that the nurse should have changed a French noun into an English verb ; that a provincial Englishman in Dickens' pages should spell it moither or moidher, and use it in the nurse's sense of to worry, or to get into a knot that has to be untied; still less that the Welsh name for plaited work should be mat, and for a spread of rushes on the floor mathr. But it so happens that my own nurse was a provin- cial Englishwoman, with the Welsh name of Griffiths, and was less skilled in French and Latin and in Punic than Doctor Latham and Professor Skeat suppose ; and she was my first authority on the English lan- guage, and one much more to be feared than they. Now, that the learned author of the Story of Crea- tion meant to write dog-latin, and hoped that he was writing dog-lathi, is very likely indeed. But he has been inspired against his will to use an English word, and I shall pin it to the English meaning. For the difference between materia and matter is almost the difference between materialism and idealism. The old mother-tongue of the White race, into which the first bishop of the Goths, labouring beside the Danube, translated the mightiest of Mediterranean The Shape 1 1 1 books, has left two precious relics of itself. One is a manuscript written in silver letters, and guarded in the university of Upsal ; the other is a living dialect not yet uprooted from two villages in the isle of Gothland. And deeming it part of this inquiry to learn somewhat of the speech of my forefathers, I made my way, not to the university of Upsal, but to the isle of Gothland. There I was fortunate, and Sweden and the White race are fortunate, enough to find a teacher in Doctor Klintberg, who has given his life to gather, as no dialect has ever yet been gathered, these precious wild flowers of speech be- fore the schoolmaster has had time to root them up. And among the treasures in his collection, which English philologists will one day prize above many books in the Bodleian, I came upon this rhyme sung by the children in one of their plays : " Abburn laikar s&t noti gar asundar ; Bar n far hul, s, kraupa n under." Or as it might be sung in many English villages : Perch plays so 'at net goes asunder ; Where un finds hole, so creeps un under. The word noti gives us the clew to mat and matter. On the one hand it merges into knot, either through a form like ge-not, or by the likeness between a knot and a knob the Ten or en is common to the Gothic and Celtic languages ; on the other hand it merges into the French natte, and so into net and mat. For a mat, as it seems needful to point out to philologists, is a net in which the holes are smaller, and the knots closer together. Now netting or matting or knotting is one of the ii2 The New Word earliest handicrafts of man ; the Congo dwarfs mat the undergrowth of the forest to entrap the elephant. It is much older than man ; the spider weaves its net, and the bird its nest. It is still older than they are ; when we speak of matted hair and matted weeds, we are thinking of a rough natural entanglement, of the network of nature rather than of man. We are not thinking of the Carthaginians, nor even of the Romans, nor of the Normans ; and though the Nor- man lady may have trimmed the Saxon nurse's tongue, she has not trimmed the Saxon sense. No one but a schoolmaster writing a scholastic treatise in tech- nical terms would dream of using the word matter in the sense of substance. For everybody else, and for the schoolmaster himself in his waking hours, it means very much what mat means, a knot or knotwork, a tangle or a net. And so, when the nurse asks, " What is the matter ? " she is not talking dog- latin, and she does not mean, what is the material substance ; but she is talking English, and she means, what is the trouble ; what has gone wrong ? Perhaps it is because the first use of a net is to stop the elephant, or the perch, from going further, perhaps it is because of its likeness with mud, that the word, or a word like it, has come to mean, in Latin if not in English, that which " occupies space and affects the senses." And yet, remarkably enough, one of the most eminent workers in physical science, Lord Kelvin, has suggested that what we call Matter began with tangled waves in the ether ; so that science is learning to give the nurse's meaning to the nurse's word. The Shape 113 The word substance, of course, means inside, and the folk word for it, the word which this writer him- self uses elsewhere, is stuff, or stuffing. That is the word stop in its materialistic form, the dentist stops a tooth, and the French write estouper, as well as etouffer. But Matter is an ontologist's word ; the knot is verily a mystery ; here is a word of an idealist tendency ; no wonder that the Story of Crea- tion tried to explain it away. Yet all this time the writer is deceiving himself and us. The word really inside his mind is neither knot nor stop, but Shape. In my Dutch word-book I have found this curious entry : " Schepping-sgeschei- denis, history of the creation." H EIGHTH HEAD THE KNOT The Unknowable. i. Ultimate Nature of Matter. 2. Logical Chemistry. 3. The Dustbin of Science. 4. Story of the Crumb. r I ^HE All-Thing being made up of strength and stuf- A fing, we are naturally curious to learn what the stuffing is made up of. Unhappily the spirit of Athanasius now enters again into the author of the Story of Shaping, with- out driving out that of Andronikos of Rhodes. " The ultimate nature of Matter remains unknown and unknowable." Unknowable has never struck me as a useful word, and it is generally an unlucky one. As soon as any enchanter has declared to us that the path of the sun across the sky is unknowable, some learner is sure to come forward and tell us all about it. As soon as another has affirmed that the number of hairs on a man's head is unknowable, the exact figures are sure to be forthcoming from a statisti- 114 The Knot 115 cian. (Since these words were first written the Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded for the discovery of the ultimate nature of Matter.) It is difficult to see what any one thinks he has to gain by holding up a warning hand to posterity in this fashion, with a Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther ! And consider what it is that remains unknow- able. The ultimate nature of Matter. " Ultimate nature " sounds far too much like ta meta ta phusika. Why does this writer take it for granted that Matter has an ultimate nature ? He goes on to say, " We can only infer what it is, by learning what it does." Clearly he sees some difference between being and doing, he knows but will not tell. He seems to say in other words, I see something called Matter moving about, and hence I infer that there is another something called its Ultimate Nature, keeping still ; which other something is unknowable. Surely that is like building a bridge you never intend to cross. Yet the author is better than his word, for he goes on to tell us somewhat, if not of the ultimate, at least of the penultimate, nature of Matter. " The actions of bodies, whatever their states, are explicable only on the assumption that the bodies are made up of infinitely small particles which, in their combined state, as mechanical units, are called molecules, and in their free state, as chemical units, are called atoms." " Infinitely " is a big word. When we have reached infinity the ultimate cannot be much farther on. The author, unhappily, was using it only as a sort of swear word, meaning very small, for presently he 1 1 6 The New Word calculates the size of these infinitely small particles. As many of them (he says) would go into a drop of water as cricket-balls into an Earth. I have for- gotten how many angels could dance upon a needle's point, according to the highest theological authority. But at this point the Story of Creation becomes so knotty, and the writer loses his way so hope- lessly among the terms element, molecule and atom, that I have to put in my own homely words what I have gathered to be the teaching of Materialism on this head. Nor ought the writer to be blamed for his failure, since he has evidently started with the belief that his authorities know what they are saying, whereas I have started with the belief that they most probably do not. II We need a Babu glossary : Element : Forethought, beginning. Atom : Uncut, uncutable. Molecule : Little heap. By the word element I understand modern chem- ists to mean those webworks in the All-Thing, such as hydrogen and gold, which they have not been able to unweave, as they unweave water into oxygen and hydrogen. Of the elements, which he some- The Knot 117 times carelessly calls atoms, the author of the Story of Creation says in his sternest Athanasian vein, " Since the present universe had its beginning the elements have undergone no change." In some past universe, perhaps, they were less stubborn. In the meanwhile, of course, they are outside the Theory of Evolution, although my teacher omits to note the fact. Of the atom, its modern discoverer, Dalton, proudly declared, " No man can split an atom ; " or, in other words, no man can split the unsplitable. The emin- ent Huxley no less rashly boasted, " The atom is truly an immortal being." My author, with a diffidence as welcome as it is unexpected, contents himself with saying that the atoms have not yet been split. And even that is not true. I find there are at least three atoms known to science, or at least to Scientology, the arithmetical atom, the physical one, and the logical one. Of these the logical one has been kept intact by un- heard of efforts ; the other two have been split, and are being split every day. The first, or chemical atom, is no more than an arithmetical term, in short it is an item. The chemist has found that when his elements unite with each other they do so always in fixed proportions, and it is the proportion which he is thinking of when he uses the word atom. Thus when he wants to say that in every gallon of water, or steam, there are two pints of hydrogen for one pint of oxygen, he puts it that the " atom " of hydrogen is H 2 . In hydrochloric acid this atom splits, and we get HI n8 The New Word or more simply H. It^is this atom which is some- times confused with element in the Story of Creation and elsewhere. It appears to have no more to do with the nature of Matter than the figure has. The atom which has for so long engaged the atten- tion of physicists, or physical chemists, is of course the old atom of Democritus, and is merely a small crumb of Matter, measuring, according to the latest and best of my authorities, a thousand millionth of an inch across. The Story of Creation terms it an assumption, or, shall we say, an image formed in the mind. Of such crumbs, real or imaginary, Matter is at present believed to be made up. When the experiment famous for giving us the Rontgen rays is made, still smaller crumblets, called cor- puscles, are believed to be rent away from the main crumb, and thus'the physical atom is split. The molecule may be regarded as a married crumb, and sometimes a polygamous one. Thus in the case of water the oxygen crumb was long believed to take to itself two hydrogen crumbs, and the little heap thus formed was not three crumbs, but one crumb. Such a molecule may be likened to a bronze coin made by melting down together two copper coins and one tin coin. No one, of course, has ever seen or handled any such crumbs. The chemist cannot pick his little heaps out of the real heap, but he can work a sort of earthquake by which the whole heap of bronze coins is rent into two heaps, one of tin coins, and one of copper coins. Every coin is to-day called a molecule, but only in a state of celibacy is it also called an atom. The Knot 119 All that is plain sailing, when it is explained. The difficulty is with the logical atom which is, as one of my authorities very sagely observes, " by defini- tion, indivisible." Accordingly, as soon as either of the other atoms does divide, the definition is re- defined to meet the altered circumstances. As thus. Finding that one pint of a gas always unites with one or more full pints of another gas, and never with any odd fraction of a pint, the chemists have concluded that every pint of gas contains the same number of crumbs. But now when the two pints of hydrogen unite with the one pint of oxygen, they do not make three pints of steam, but only two pints. Therefore the chemists choose to say that the num- ber of steam crumbs is the same with that of the original hydrogen crumbs, and double that of the original oxygen crumbs. What, then, has happened ? Each of the oxygen crumbs has split in two, one half joining each hydrogen crumb. But the atom is " by definition, indivisible." How then can it split ? The answer is that the oxygen crumb must be a double crumb. It is not an atom, but a little heap of two atoms. Instead of being a penny it is two halfpennies stuck together like the Siamese Twins. And each halfpenny is a logical atom. One is tempted to add Euclid's Q. E. D. By similar reasoning the atoms of hydrogen and chlorine have also been revealed as twins ; and should occasion arise for it no doubt the twins will become triplets, and the halfpennies farthings. In this way the integrity of the logical atom should always be main- tained. 120 The New Word Meanwhile I will commend to the attention of all atomists the Chinese definition of a Point. " A point is a thing which has not got division." Such is the story of the Atom ; and we cannot be surprised if the historian of Creation has been caught tripping in the network of arithmetic, logic and imagination, which I have laboured to unweave, in the belief that what can be said in shorthand can be said in longhand, if we take the pains. Ill The Story of Creation now leaves the crumbs, to bring upon the scene a new item inexcusably omit- ted from the inventory of the universe. This is an " elastic medium " called Ether, something as much finer than air as the crumbs are finer than bricks. So that, ridding my mind of the words " very small " which can only mean small beside a man I learn that the All-Thing is a sort of jelly with bricks jost- ling each other inside it under the stress of that Power which formed the second item in the inventory. The Ether, it seems, is a " necessary assumption ; " it is indeed a sort of dustbin into which Science throws her breakages. I understand, however, from other sources of information, that the dustbin is becoming choked, and that Science has now called for another, and far finer medium, to be called Ethereon, which The Knot 121 will trickle through the Ether as that trickles through the air, and as water trickles through a sponge. Nor shall I be surprised to hear later on that even in the Ethereon Science has not got quite to the bottom of Everything, and that finer and finer mediums, Etheroids and Ethereonoids and Etherolites, v/ill go on trickling through each other to endlessness. The world is held up by an elephant, and the elephant is held up by a tortoise, and the tortoise is held up by what ? IV In the meanwhile the story of Matter has not ended with the crumb. The crumb has been guessed by no mean guesser to be made of Ether, to be a sort of ring made by a whirlpool in the Ether, which has somehow got its tail into its mouth like a fried whiting. That guess no longer holds the field. According to the last report I have received from the headquarters of science a report which has caused much of my language in the first draft of this Letter to take an air of plagiarism the crumb is made up of electricity, which is to say, amber- strength. This strength shows two sides, or ways, called yea and nay, and both join to shape the crumb. The crumb is a relatively big ball of yea strength inside which a swarm of lesser balls of nay strength 122 The New Word are going round and round, the little balls having between them as much of nay as the bigger ball has of yea. I give the learned words : " The hydrogen atom consists of a big sphere of uniformly distributed positive electrification, and a thousand negative corpuscles travelling, each in its own orbit, within the positive sphere. The total of positive electrification is equal to the sum of the negatives in the thousand corpuscles." Such is the image of Matter formed in the mind of a great scientist, too true a scientist to offer it as anything but a guess. It may not be the right guess. It is not there, perhaps, that pretty Chinese toy, those wheels within a wheel, that dance of moons within the belly of their sun. The pick of Science has gone too deep, and struck the well of poetry. But as it stands it is the last and best guess that science has made in our time about the ultimate nature of Matter. And what else is it but a network a thousand knots tied up in one knot ? The pick of the physicist has chimed against the pick of the psychologist, as in the middle of a tunnel, and wrought a thorough- fare for light. And that is what I call a Rhyme. Of what is the network made ? Let us hear the last word of Materialism on itself. " Matter is elec- tric charge, or electric charge is Matter, whichever way we like to put it." The ultimate nature of Matter is Power. The inventory of the universe was too long by half. NINTH HEAD THE DEMON IN THE STONE Force and Energy. i. The Quarrel of the Twins. 2. Pulling and Pushing. 3. The Gadarene Swine. 4. Why a Stone Falls. 5. Witchcraft. I find it harder to write about strength than about shapes, for the same reason that I find it harder to explain the word idealist than the word dynamite. The author of the Story of Creation, on the other hand, seems to have approached his second topic with peculiar confidence, and as one who had made it his own ; for in his preface he has undertaken to give " rigid and definite meanings " to the words Force and Energy ; a service so great that he himself perhaps does not see how great it is. However, his teaching on this head is not wholly his own. He is less an inventor than a legislator, bringing order into the realm of scientific thought. Unlike that other lawgiver, whose Story of Crea- tion still finds readers, the present writer begins his 123 124 The New Word stiff and inclosed explanations of Force and Energy by dropping into a rather unexpected, and surely needless, vein of logic. " If atoms are unchangeable under their present conditions, and changeable only in their relations through combination with other atoms, it follows that all changes are due to motion." I am sorry to have to say so, but I cannot make sense of that. I should have thought the changes of the unchangeable atoms were their motion. If motion is not change, but something else that brings about change, we ought to be told what motion is. And that is just what we are not told. The author's silence on this head is all the more regrettable inas- much as the rigid and definite meanings given to Force and Energy are hinged on the word motion. " Power. Motion throughout the universe is pro- duced or destroyed, quickened or retarded, increased or lessened, by two indestructible powers of opposite nature to each other (a) Force, and (b) Energy." And so there is not one Power but two Powers, each full-armed and deathless, waging everlasting war with one another, as they have done for so many ages, under other names, in other stories of creation, immortal Twins, with an immortal Quarrel. Our author names them in significant disorder, for he means that motion is produced by (b) Energy, and destroyed by (a) Force. One would think that motion must be produced before it can be destroyed, and therefore that Energy was (a) and Force was (b). The author, it is plain, was thinking when he began The Demon in the Stone 125 the sentence, and so he wrote like an Idealist. As soon as he left off thinking he dropped instinctively into Materialism. Now what are Energy and Force at strife about ? Motion. Between them they are worrying motion like two dogs worrying a bone. Motion, as we have just read, is hard at work causing the changes in the All-Thing. But these angry Powers will not let it alone. They have no work of their own, be- cause motion has got their job, and so they set upon motion as two trades unionists set upon a blackleg. One of them produces motion out of what we are not told, but I expect out of the Ether ; the other destroys it. One quickens and increases motion ; the other first retards and then lessens it. The discovery that motion can be retarded without being lessened, or lessened without being retarded, is perhaps the greatest feat of scientific terminology, forming as it does the keystone of the famous Kinetic Molecular Theory of Gases. As it is rather puzzling to the untrained mind, I have taken pains to explain it hereinafter. II The meanings given to the terms Force and Energy in the Story of Creation may be rigid and definite, but they are a little hard to find. Force, the book says, binds together bits of " pon- 126 The New Word derable matter." This was the first hint to me that there were two kinds of Matter, one which had weight, and another which had none. I am sorry to add that neither in this place, nor elsewhere in the book, have I been able to glean the least information about the second kind, the imponderable Matter. I only know that there is such a thing, because my teacher says again that " Force inheres in, and can never be taken from, ponderable Matter." I did not try to understand the learned words Gravitation, Cohesion and Affinity, which my guide used as the names for various forms of what he called attraction. Attraction, I saw at once, was the Mediterranean way of writing pull-towards ; and hence I understood at length that Force must be strength pulling-to, and Energy must be strength pushing-fro. These twain seemed at first to be counterparts of one another, yet the Story of Creation went on to show that they were very much otherwise. To begin with, the Pull strength was bound up in Matter so that it could not be shifted ; whereas the Push was not so bound up, and you could take it from one bit of Matter, and give it to another bit. Thus, if water were falling under the mere Pull of the earth, as Newton believed, you could not make it turn a mill-wheel, and grind corn ; whereas if it were being pushed uphill, you could. This was worth knowing, because for thousand of years mil- lers^,with untrained minds, men for whom the terms Force and Energy have not got rigid and definite meanings, have been making-believe to turn mill- The Demon in the Stone 127 wheels and grind corn in that wrong way, and making what one fears must be ideal bread. Another serious consequence was that, while the Pull always stopped in its own bit of Matter, and so was safe, the Push, through being handled, and carried hither and thither, and slopped about all over the place, so to speak, was gradually getting " dissipated," that is to say, spilt, in the Ether. And although my teacher rather shirked this alarming feature of the business, he hinted darkly that some- thing might have to be said about it later on, when the Story of Creation drew to its end, or, in his own menacing words, " when the ultimate destiny of the universe is considered." But by far the most interesting difference between the two Powers was this, that whereas there seemed to be only one kind of Pull, which pulled, there were two kinds of Push, one which pushed, and another which could push if it liked, but did not. I give the writer's words : " Energy is of two kinds, active and passive, or in the terms of science, kinetic and potential." I am bound to say that here I disliked my author's terms less than those of science. Kinetic sounds like Greek, and potential sounds like Latin, and I do not see why science should mix up two Mediterranean languages in order to express such simple meanings as going and still. At this point, I am glad to say, my teacher passed from words to things, and gave me some examples of the mysterious unpushing Push. They are a stone lying on the roof of a house, or on a mountain ; 128 The New Word a clock wound up but not going ; a bed of coal, and a barrel of gunpowder. " This (he goes on) becomes kinetic when the stone falls, the clock goes, the coal burns, or the gunpowder explodes." I shall take the first of these examples, because it is the simplest, and because I have met with it elsewhere. Of the others, I will only remark in passing, first, that there can be no such thing as a clock wound up but not going the hands may not be going, but assuredly the spring is being worn out in its effort to move the hands ; secondly, that there is no more energy, going or otherwise, in a bed of coal than in a feather bed, or a flower bed, or any other bed indeed the flower bed grows the tree that turns into the coal ; and thirdly, that there is a far more mysterious energy in a barrel of beer than in a barrel of gunpowder ; for the barrel of gun- powder can only blow a man to pieces, whereas the barrel of beer can make him see double ; and so we make that " passage from chemistry to conscious- ness " which the author pretended in his preface we could not make. Ill I first met the stone lying on the roof of a house, in a little book on the Conservation of Energy, in which it was credited with Energy of Position. I had The Demon in the Stone 129 never understood very well what that could be, and I understood it no better when it was called Potential Energy. I understood that such a stone had weight ; but that was mere Force, or Pulling strength. What was this Latin Energy ; and how did the stone get it ; and how was a stone lying on the roof of a house, or on a mountain, different from any other stone ? The answer seemed to be that the stone could fall, when its Latin Energy would become Greek. In other words, if you took away the house, or the moun- tain, the stone would fall, not by its own weight, but because it was being pushed downwards, just as if I should pick up a stone and throw it down. But if that were so, how was I to tell the difference between this Energy that made stones fall from the roofs of houses, and the Force that made you and me fall, and every- thing fall ? Newton would have been surprised, I fancy, to learn that his famous apple fell because of its energy. But perhaps apples on trees have not got Energy of Position ; only apples on the roof of a house. I should have liked to ask these learned and dis- tinguished writers whether a stone lying, not on a roof, but on the ground, had any of this enchanted Energy ; or a stone lying, not on a mountain, but on a plain. And if not, how high must the stone be to get it. I wanted to know where Energy of Posi- tion left off, and Force began. If you should put a stone in a basket, and lower it halfway down a well, would that stone have Energy of Position ? It seemed to me that you might go right down to the middle of the earth, finding nothing but Energy of 130 The New Word Position all the way. I was tempted to fear that there must be a mistake in the Story of Creation ; and that it was really this Energy that inhered in, and could never be taken from, ponderable Matter. Thus the rigid and definite meaning of Force had turned out to be Potential Energy. Perhaps the author has written here more truly than he knew. Yet I think it evident that to the trained mind there is something peculiar and fascinating about stones lying on the roof of a house ; they have a charm that other stones have not. The magic attri- bute is called by one of my authorities " advantage over a Force," namely the Force of Gravity. But then it seems to the untrained mind that all the tiles of the roof, and the house itself for that matter, have the same advantage. The real advantage which the stone lying on the roof of a house has over a stone lying on the ground is your advantage, because it is easier for you to throw a stone downwards than up- wards. But in both of those cases it is your energy that moves the stone, with its own weight added in one case, and subtracted in the other. However that is just what science, speaking through the mouth of its priests, will not allow. According to them, when you throw the stone down there is some other power at work beside your push and the earth's pull ; there is this mysterious Potential Energy which has been inside the stone all the time. It seems to be a scientific case of demon-possession. The demon of Latin Energy enters into some stones but not others. It prefers stones on the roof of a house if it can get them, but if not, it will take stones The Demon in the Stone 131 on mountains, just as the demons in the gospel, when they were cast out of the man, entered into the swine. It is remarkable that those demons be- haved very much like Energetic ones, for they drove the swine violently down a steep place into the sea. I hope it is not irreverent to say that I do not believe in this Gadarene Energy. I do not see why it should be called in to do the work that Force is already doing. It would be just as easy to discover a kind of Force that would do what Energy the Greek Energy that is energetic does. Force is pulling things towards the middle of the earth. But everything does not get there. Some bits of Matter get in front and hold the others back. And the power by which they do so is not Energy, it is Force of Position. I can even find another magic stone, as an example, a stone falling into a glass of water. As the stone falls down it will push the water up. Here is a plain case of Latin Force, the Force that does what you would expect Energy to do. IV The Story of Creation does not end here, unhappily. For its author, not content with his Potential Energy, which does what Force was doing, has gone on to 132 The New Word invent yet another kind of Energy, which does the whole work over again. He does this very easily. For just as he first divided Power into Force and Energy, and next divided Energy into going and stopping Energy, so now he goes on to divide the going, or, as one might say, the Energetic Energy, again into three kinds, one of which does what Force and Unenergetic Energy both do. " Each kind of kinetic Energy has separating, com- bining and neutral motion. Example of Separative a stone thrown upwards ; example of Combining a stone falling ; example of Neutral a top spinning in the same place." So, therefore, what really makes the stone fall is neither Force nor Latin Energy, but Greek Energy which is going the wrong way ; shall I call it Anti- energetic Energy ? And I see no reason why the learned writer should not have carried his scientific terms, with their rigid and definite meanings, a good deal farther. For after the stone has fallen it is likely to bound up again, and that will clearly be an example of Redis- tributive, or Ultra-Energetic, Energy. And then it will be almost sure to fall again under the stress of Katasynthetic Energy ; unless it should happen to lodge on the roof of a house, and thereby offer a rare example of Extrapotential, not to say Extrava- gant, Energy. The Demon in the Stone 133 The whole of this laboured nonsense flows from a mistake at starting, the mistake of trying to think of strength as two rigid and definite and indestruct- ible strengths ; whereas strength is like a wave with two faces which are neither rigid nor definite nor indestructible, but are forever changing into one another, as the wave's crest becomes the trough, and the trough, the crest ; and Force and Energy are not two Powers, but two names for one Power, working To and Fro. The author of the Story of Creation has let his mind be tripped up by bad language. It is not worse language than that of other text-books ; I chose his book because it claimed to be better written than other books, to be indeed a school-book ; and lan- guage that would be bad in any book is damnable in a schoolbook. If the teacher's words trip up his own mind, what must they do to the child's mind ? Has not Topelius given us a glimpse in his delight- ful story of the little boy fresh from his first geo- graphy lesson, trying to talk to the maidservant in words like oblate spheroid and equator ? As soon as men, however learned and distinguished, put their minds to sleep with Mediterranean words, they begin to gabble like little Walter. While they are talking in Babu, they are thinking like 134 The New Word Andronikos of Rhodes. Let us see if we can understand them any better than they understand themselves. What they are really thinking of all this time is not a stone on a mountain, which of course has no more energy than the rest of the mountain, but a loose stone, in other words, a stone that is going to fall. The stone on the house-roof would never have become a scientific problem, unless it had slipped off the roof on to the ground. It is what happens when it reaches the ground that has caused all the trouble. The learned men have noticed that if you drop a glass test-tube on your laboratory floor it is more likely to break than if it had been on the floor all along. They have been struck by this interest- ing fact, which even children have noticed in connec- tion with their toys ; and they have wanted to account for it. And finding that they could not ac- count for it, they have done what science in a diffi- culty always does, they have lulled their minds to sleep with spells from the Greek lexicon. Hence all this demonology and witchcraft. Why does the fallen test-tube break ? Why does the falling stone descend as though it were being sucked downwards in a whirlpool as perhaps it is ? It cannot be mere weight that does all this, because the falling stone is no heavier than any other stone. The answer of science is that there must be a demon in the stone ; and it is that demon who breaks the stone, or makes it bound up again, or, if the stone be flint and fall upon another flint, strikes out a spark the demon in his fiery shape. The Demon in tKe Stone 135 If that be so, how did the demon get into the stone ? Here is the riddle they have got to read. Once upon a time a demon used to enter into the stone while it was falling through the air, and the name of that demon was Momentum, which is to say, being interpreted, Rush. In these days that demon of the air has been exorcised, but only to make room for a far more subtle fiend, the Demon of the House- Roof. This demon does not wait till the stone begins to fall ; no, he was there all the time lurking inside it, while it was lying there so quietly and peacefully among the Christian tiles. Then how did this demon get into the stone ? There stands the riddle, and the learned men think that they have read it, as they think they have read other riddles, by muttering something that sounds uncommonly like hie haec hoc. But they have not told us how the demon got into the stone. The one sound example of Energy of Position, the one case in which the words are not wholly mean- ingless, is that of the scale in which you balance a pound of meat by an ounce weight at the end of a lever. And as soon as we utter the word lever, lo ! the Energetic demon is conjured back into the Ethereal dustbin. We are talking, not metaphysics, but mechanics, and measuring the ways of strength instead of pretending to account for them. The strength with which a falling stone strikes the ground is its weight, multiplied by the height from which it fell. So much we know, the rest is ta meta ta phusika and hie haec hoc. 136 The New Word All this is not really science, but only Scientology. It is language. It is the magic lullaby in which the shapes of things melt and reshape themselves for- ever. And so, when we would try to stop that wheel we call the mind, and look between the spokes, at once the All-Thing in its turn begins to spin about us, and all which it contains to slide and glide away : as in that wondrous story of creation handed down from Finnish sorcerers of old, when the wizard Lem- minkainen comes into the hall and sings ; and while he sings the swords vanish out of the hands of the f casters, and the cups vanish from their lips, and the tables and the walls melt and fade, and lastly the hall itself and all within it melt and fade away, and only the magic song goes on. TENTH HEAD THE MAN IN THE CRUMB Young Cameron. i. A Famous Cryptogram. 2. Perfect Elasticity. 3. Ideal Crumbs. 4. Faith. 5. Boyle's Law Accounted for. T EST I should be misled about Materialism by ^ keeping to one book, and that one written by a man of letters rather than a practical scientist, I went out into the street, and was fortunate enough to find another with the tempting title Chemical Theory for Beginners. This time there could be no mistake ; the book was a real school-book, and it had belonged to a real school-boy ; I found his name, Cameron, and the name of his school, on the fly-leaf. It was the work of two learned specialists on the staff of a famous university. In England the publisher is more impor- tant than the author, and this book was published by the most important publisher hi England. It was published in the year of Nobel's death. As we have seen, there is a slight cloud over the Story of Creation. If it is not under lock and key in the Free Libraries, there must be many who would like it to be so. But no one would dream of locking up the Chemical Theory for Beginners. It is perfectly 138 The New Word respectable. It is a book that might have been written by a bishop. Its contents are taught to the sons of bishops in the most conservative schools in England. They are taught alongside of the Catechism of the Church of England. And yet they are not one whit less materialistic than what we have been reading. The passage I have picked out for examina- tion is a chief cornerstone of the Materialistic Faith. The schoolmasters have dealt with young Cameron fairly, according to their lights. They have treated his mind as if it were a badger's pit. You put in the badger, and you put in the dog, and you wait to see which comes out first. They have thrown in the Catechism, and they have thrown in the Chemical Theory, and now they are waiting to see whether Cameron will turn out a Christian or an Atheist. I got this book to learn what young Cameron had to learn, whether he liked it or not, about Going Crumbs. The Going Crumb has been invented to account for an interesting fact which any one may examine for himself, what science calls a law. In one of my authorities it is thus stated. (Here the italics are my own.) " Gases are highly elastic. According to Boyle's Law the volume of a gas is inversely as the pressure, The Man in the Crumb 139 whilst the density and elastic force are directly as the pressure and inversely as the volume." That is to say, in homely words, the more you squeeze gas, the more it will shrink, and the more it will squeeze back. Elastic is not a very good word ; the gas behaves more like a spring shutting up than a piece of elastic. Nor is the statement quite true ; Boyle's Law is sometimes broken, like real laws. However the fact itself is very simple, so simple that learned men felt they must account for it. So they set to work, and as we should expect them to do when they want to make anything that is simple yet more simple, they began by taking down the Greek lexicon. They called their explanation the Kinetic Molecular Theory. The English for that, as far as I can make out, is the Going Crumb View. I am not sure that I ought not to write Belief instead of View. I am afraid that Cameron believes that he has really viewed the going crumbs. Only Ulysses can listen in safety to the siren's song. We will read over this famous spell. " According to this theory the particles of a gas which are identical with the chemical molecules are practically independent of each other, and are briskly moving in all directions in straight lines. It frequently happens that the particles encounter each other, and also the walls of the vessel containing them ; but as they are supposed to behave like per- fectly elastic bodies, there is no loss of their energy 140 The New Word of motion in such encounters, merely their direc- tions and relative velocities being changed by the collision. " The pressure exerted by a~gas^on~the vessel con- taining it, is due to the impacts of the gas molecules on the walls of the vessel. On this hypothesis we can easily account for Boyle's Law." And so these learned men have accounted for the gas being highly elastic by supposing that its crumbs are perfectly elastic ; and all they now have to do is to account for the crumbs being perfectly elastic. But there is more in this View than meets the eye. The cryptogram has been put together with a cunning that, in a Jesuit casuist, would be considered fraud. Let us see if we can unriddle it, bearing in mind that whatever reverence is due to the sophists, or the casuists, of Science, a greater reverence is due to Cameron. II I will put aside the straight lines at once with the remark that real crumbs do not move in straight lines, only ideal crumbs do so. It was careless of the distinguished writers to use an English word like straight. A bright boy would have found them out at once. Another time they had better write rectilinear. Now let us see what is happening. A swarm of racket-balls are flying this way and that inside a The Man in the Crumb 141 racket-court, and trying to get out. They bump against each other, and against the wall, and when they bump they change their " relative " velocities. But as they are supposed to be made of " perfect elastic " they do not lose their " Energy of Motion." The word relative is the first trap, and we must begin by getting rid of it. Nothing is going but the elastic racket-balls. The only relation is between the speed of one ball, and the speed of another. The only way in which they can change their relative velocities is by one ball going faster, and the other slower, by one ball gaining speed, and the other losing it. We must be firm with the scientific wizards here. We must not allow them to create crumbs that can change their relative velocities without changing their velocities. We now have to follow the racket-ball that has got the worst of the encounter. We must watch this crippled warrior very closely as he limps out of the fray, for a strange thing is about to happen to him. When real racket-balls bump, no matter what elastic they are made of, they will lose speed, and after they have bumped each other, and bumped the wall of the racket-court, often enough they will slow down and stop. But this ideal racket-ball is not allowed to slow down and stop, because, if it should, the gas would cease to be gas. It would have to go out into the Ether. To save it from that fate, after a time the beaten crumb gets its breath again, and goes on as fast as ever. How is this cure effected ? Who puts the lame man on his legs again, and fur- nishes the wounded bird with fresh wings to fly. 142 The New Word According to this View, the Good Samaritan is perfect elasticity. But if perfect elasticity can save a racket-ball from stopping, it should also save it from slowing. Prevention is better than cure. If perfect elasticity is not at hand when it is really needed, to bring off the crumb harmless from its encounter, it is too late for it to come on the scene afterwards, and try to revive the flagging spirits of the sufferer to their former briskness. We must draw the line somewhere, even in a scientific hypothesis. We may allow the wizards their perfect elasticity, though we may have our private doubts as to whether there is such a thing, and whether they understand what they are saying. But an elasticity that made a slowing india-rubber ball put on a spurt in the middle of the air would be repeating elasticity. We must be firm here also. We must not allow all the other laws of nature, and of grammar, to be set aside to account for Boyle's not-quite-true Law. The words perfect elasticity in this connection are another trap. What really keeps up the heart of the worsted crumb, and sends it into the fight again, this time with better luck, is not its elasticity but its Energy of Motion. The whole magic of the incanta- tion is here. The whole art of the ideal racket-ball, the difference between it and other racket-balls, is that it can lose speed without losing " Energy of Motion." What is that, messieurs Clausius and Clerk Maxwell, if you please ? The Man in the Crumb 143 in We must not pin down the word Energy to Push, be- cause the framers of the cryptogram may not have read, or may not have believed, the Story of Creation. I will write Strength of Going. What is the differ- ence between that and Speed ? The word speed, or in Babu, velocity, is not an Andronican one. It is a plain term of measurement, like length and weight, and it is used in measuring Energy of Motion. We measure strength by measur- ing its work, and speed is the work of Energy of Motion. If a crumb, or a racket-ball, or a railway- train, is going at all, it is going through space, and in time, and we can measure the strength with which it is going, by measuring the space and the time, and dividing the first measure by the second. The quo- tient, or result, is called the speed of the crumb or of the train, and the speed exactly corresponds with the Energy of Motion. If a railway train has slowed down on account of having bumped against another train it can pick up its speed again. But the strength which enables it to do so is not Energy of Motion, but Energy of Steam. In order to distinguish between the two we have only to uncouple the engine from the rest of the train. The strength left in the train is Energy 144 The New Word of Motion, and the train will run as long as it holds out. But now if the train bumps against another, it will lose part of its Energy of Motion, and we can measure the loss of energy by measuring the loss of speed. The words " velocity " and " energy of motion," used in this cryptogram, mean the same thing. Its learned framers, of course, knew this as well as I do. What they must have meant to say is that whatever speed a crumb loses by bumping against a slower crumb, it will presently regain by bumping against a faster crumb, and so the total velocity among the whole of the crumbs will not be changed. Unfortu- nately that is not what they have said. They have left Cameron to believe, and if I know anything of boys or men, he does believe, that an ideal crumb can go as strongly as ever while it is coming to a dead stop, and as weakly as ever while it is hurling through space at the rate of a billion diameters of the universe in the trillionth of a second of time. Secrecy is said by the lawyers to be a badge of fraud. This cryptogram is a fraud upon young Cameron, because it does not tell him fairly that there is a man in the Going Crumb. The Going Crumb View is another example of scientific anthropo- morphism, or demonology. What makes the crumb go ? When the savage sees a steam engine going, and does not know how it goes, he says fairly enough that there must be a man inside it. And indeed there is a man inside it, a man named Watt. That is what Cameron would say about the Going Crumb if he were given the chance ; and most likely he The Man in the Crumb 145 would be right. Science is determined not to give him the chance, and in order to blind him, and be- wilder him, she has taken the dead cipher whose right name is Speed, and dressed it up in an old suit of clothes, and clapped on it a turnip's head, and an old hat, and stuck a candle inside it, and called it Energy of Motion. The Kinetic Molecular Theory is the view that crumbs have souls. IV The Going Crumb View, with its straight lines, which are curves ; its crumbs which are images formed in the mind out of real crumbs and arith- metical ciphers ; its Andronican elasticity, its man- faced energy of motion, and its double-faced veloci- ties ; all brought together to account for a not-quite- true law ; is a fair sample, taken at haphazard, of scientological writing. It is no whit better than theological writing. And unhappily Scientology is as often mistaken for science as theology is for worship. Since it was for young Cameron's sake that I had wrestled with this knot of words I made the experi- ment of reading over my notes to a grown-up Cameron. I read them to a young man of naturally thought- ful mind, who had taken lessons in physical science, which I have never been fortunate enough to do, and 146 The New Word who was disposed in consequence, perhaps, to feel towards me some of that distrust which a trained mind feels towards an untrained one. He listened to me patiently till I came to the word faith, when he broke in rather warmly. " That is most unfair. No scientist regards a theory as a faith. He is always ready to abandon it the moment it is shown to be unsound." I thought that was encouraging, and I read on. My young friend allowed what I had said about the straight lines, though I found it was news to him. We had a misunderstanding over the relative velocities, my friend being very anxious to bring in the word mass, which does not occur in the cryptogram. His point was that in a compound, or mixed, gas the crumbs would be of different weights. I was patient with him, and after a long argument he allowed me to take the case of an unmixed gas, in which the crumbs were all of the same weight. In the end we got to the words " perfectly elastic," and I asked my young friend what he meant by the word elastic. It was like dropping a penny in an automatic machine, for he instantly burst out with a shower of words like " deformation," and " minimum of energy "; and I had to stop him, and say that such words were over my head, and that they did not help me to understand the word elastic. I asked him if a piece of elastic were elastic, and he rather grudgingly allowed that it was. Then I said, " Let us stick to that, and we shall know where we are. Now what is meant by perfectly elastic ? The Man in the Crumb 147 Is a piece of india-rubber that yields stubbornly, and springs back strongly, more or less elastic than a piece that yields easily and springs back weakly ? " " Both are equally elastic," was the answer. " Then anything that is elastic at all is perfectly elastic ? " My young friend said that was so. Then he changed his mind, and told me that elasticity was a concep- tion perfectly well understood by scientists, and that it had nothing to do with real elastic. He began to draw a diagram on a piece of paper to make the con- ception clear to me, and then he found the diagram did not make it any clearer to himself, and tore it up. My enchanted young friend went away at last, more firmly convinced of his theory than ever, and promising to bring me a really good book on physics that would tell me exactly what elasticity was. I am still waiting for that really good book on physics. Unhappily young Cameron is waiting too. My aim in criticising scientific language is not to hurt science, but to help it. I am, as I have said, myself a scientist. I merely act on the altruistic principle by writing against my own side, by beating good men and leaving wicked men alone. It is in that spirit that I shall now go on to show 148 The New Word the learned authors of the Chemical Theory for Be- ginners that their cryptogram does less than justice to the Going Crumbs. In saying that crumbs are perfectly elastic they mean that when they strike against anything hard, such as a wall, they will come back going as fast as they went. That is the only meaning of the words, and as no one understands very much about elastic, it would have been better to call the crumbs perfectly steady-going. Of course no crumbs can behave like that, but in a scientific hypothesis possibility is of no consequence. In this case the chief problem is the wall, because it is the terrible and ever-increasing thumps of the Going Crumbs against the wall of the containing vessel that account for Boyle's Law. It is expressly to save the Going Crumb from injury from the wall that it has been endowed with perfect elasticity, and the wall, we may suppose, with perfect rigidity, though the cryptogram is silent on that point. This is the armour of Achilles. Gad in it, the invulner- able crumb dashes itself time after time against the immoveable wall without taking the least hurt. But now what happens when it meets another crumb ? We have answered this question in calling the wall rigid. A railway train that overtakes a slower train in front of it, is better off than if it ran into a wall. But that is because it wants to go forward, and not back. A Going Crumb does not care which way it goes ; all it wants is to keep up its speed. And therefore it is worse off when it overtakes a slower crumb, and has to push it along, than when The Man in the Crumb 149 it strikes the wall. It is no good being perfectly elastic when you strike a feather bed. It is like trying to lean up against a wall that is falling away from you, to try to rebound from a crumb going the same way as yourself. We have only to look at an india-rubber ball striking a wall, or striking the net of a tennis court, to see the difference. But if it is better for such a ball to strike a wall than a yielding net, it is better still for it to strike a tennis racket that is coming towards it. In that case it rebounds with all its own strength, and the strength of the racket, or of the tennis-player, added as a kick behind ; and the more elastic the racket is, and the harder it hits, the better for the elastic ball. I am not a very good elastician, but I am clear of this much, that when two Going Crumbs, sheathed in enchanted mail, meet each other in full career, the speed of each must be doubled by the encounter. What is the consequence of these mathematical truths ? Whenever two steady-going crumbs meet frontways there is a gain of speed for both. When one overtakes another from behind, there is a loss of speed for one, but what it loses is gained by the other. If we now consider a million crumbs as hav- ing a million pounds of speed between them, we shall see that their joint capital is not lessened by a shilling here and there being taken out of the pocket of one crumb, and put into the pocket of another ; whereas the joint capital is increased whenever two crumbs endow each other with anything from a shilling up- wards to a pound. Moreover the addition takes place 150 The New Word very much oftener than the exchange, because it takes less time for a crumb to meet another coming towards it, than to overtake one going from it. The result of all this is that, just as real crumbs would gradually slow down and stop, and put an end to the gas in one way ; so these ideal crumbs will gradually quicken their pace till they burst into flame, and put an end to the gas in another way. That is the dilemma, and I will leave science to deal with it. In order to be understood by perfect elasticians, I will put it into shorthand : The cumu- lative effect of the collision between kinetic mole- cules must be to equalise their average velocity, and equal average velocity must tend to produce a greater number of collisions at points of contact anterior to the molecular diameter which is at right angles to the line of direction of the molecule, than at points posterior to that diameter ; so that whether such collisions accelerate or diminish the velocity of the molecule, their cumulative result must ultimately be fatal to the equilibrium of the gas. The cryptogram, we can now see, was too faint- hearted when it said that there was no loss of Energy of Motion in the encounters between the Going Crumbs. There is a gain of Energy of Motion ; and it is of course that gain that produces the increasing fury of the thumps against the wall of the contain- ing vessel. In this way we have accounted for Boyle's Law much better than the Kinetic Molecular Theory accounts for it. Indeed the only thing we have not accounted for is the Kinetic Molecule. ELEVENTH HEAD THE CONJURING TRICK The Idealist Lexicon. i. The Conjurer of Alexan- dria. 2. Pure Assurance. 3. The Child's Riddle. 4. The Enchanted Castle. 5. A Work of an Idealist Tendency. "TAESCARTES likened his search for some one cer- J_y tain truth on which to build, to the demand of Archimedes for a fulcrum on which to swing the earth. I seek to tell what manner of book is worth a bag of gold, and what I need is one firm word that will not change into some other word, and slide and glide away. We have now dealt with the Idealism that looks within, and the Materialism that looks without, it- self. In both cases our quarrel was with words ; but whereas Idealism was all words, we quarrelled with it altogether ; and whereas Materialism was a mix- ture of facts and words, we had no quarrel with its facts. We distinguished between science and Scientology. Such differential treatment accords with the spirit of the Will we are construing, in which there are three bequests to science. If the Testator's idealism 152 The New Word be opposed to materialism, it cannot be the mate- rialism of the laboratory, and must be the material- ism of the lexicon. Where does that opposition begin ? The last word of Materialism is not Matter, but Power. We have seen that in many ways. We have seen the demon in the falling stone, and the man in the going crumb. We have seen it still more clearly in the dissected atom, which proved to be all demon, and no crumb. The abiding mystery in the material universe is strength. Strength is, not the last word, but, verily speaking, the first word, in the scientific lexicon. It is the word which science has not ex- plained, but by which she explains all other words. What is the first word in the idealist lexicon ? What is the word that denies Strength ? " A point is that which hath no parts, and no magnitude." With these words began a book which was put into my hands, of course without the slightest warning of what it was about, when I was twelve years old. I need not remind any one that, like the Latin Gram- mar, it was a Mediterranean book, written in Medi- terranean words which I only half understood. The Conjuring Trick 153 The Romans did not write the book, any more than they wrote the Latin Grammar or the Catholic Creed. In school they were themselves Babus. Dogma streamed on Europe for two thousand years from the great lighthouse of Alexandria. The Greeks themselves did not write the dogma ; their share in it was the editing. They were vikings who ransacked the temples of buried cities and for- gotten realms, and brought forth the hoards of know- ledge into the marketplace. They were publishers, and Alexandria was their chief publishing house. Euclid himself was no famous geometrician, but an immortal editor. This book of his is like a hard, bright crystal imbedded in the human brain. To me it came as literature, and I can still recall the pleasure with which I read the opening pages. I thought the ancient Alexandrian the ablest writer I had ever met with, the one who knew most surely what he wanted to say, and said it in the surest words. Those axioms, I remember, struck me as marvels of verihood ; I was not awake to see that they had told me nothing but that more is more than less, and less is less than more. I read on till I came to the place where the old conjurer, in order to show that two three-cornered figures are a pair, makes-believe to pick up one and set it down upon the other. When I saw that slice of pure flatness rise through the air before my eyes, as though it were an aeroplane, and settle down upon another slice, my mind, young as it was, boggled at the sight. The African wizard with his magic spell had cast me into a dream, and in my dream 154 The New Word he had taken me by the sleeve and led me into a flat world, a world in which there was neither height nor depth, neither up nor down, neither top nor bottom ; and now, hey presto ! he had jerked me out of the flat world back into the real world in which thin pieces of paper can be picked up and set down on the top of other pieces. I was surprised in the same way as Alice when she saw the cat in Won- derland go away and leave its grin behind. How long have we all dwelt in Wonderland, and watched other Mediterranean wizards working their famous spell that changes the cat without changing the grin? And now I have to see whether that hard, bright crystal can be a fulcrum for the mind ; if in the lexicon of Pure Earth-Measure there is any word by which I can measure the Testator's word. Was not " exact " one of the explanations of " idealist." II The word Mathematics seems to mean assurance, or making sure ; and that being so we can understand why Bacon called it the handmaid of the sciences, and why Descartes wanted to make it the maid-of- all-work. The race of men before the Stone-cutters made sure The Conjuring Trick 155 of things by smelling them, a habit that still breathes in our word know. It was not till men got knives that they could cut things open, and change know- ledge into science. In doing so, as well as in whole groups of words, they showed their growing trust in the eye. This turning towards the light has its bodily counterpart in the great brain-growth towards the eyeballs, a growth wrought partly by the chemic power of light, and thus a real bridge between chem- istry and wakefulness ; a growth which has helped to shape the human skull, and so made man a child of light. But the eye only sees in two measurements ; it can see length and breadth, but thickness it cannot see. The sense of sight is but a daughter of the sense of touch ; the eye a magic finger reaching forth into the abyss. Again, there are two sides to making sure, and one of them is the thing that you make sure of. Sights come and go ; the sun himself is a mere season- ticket-holder of the sky ; your moon changes like a woman's temper ; that big blue cave of stars is not half so steady as one's own cave. Only the firm earth beneath your feet is fixed. You measure that, you go by steps, and you know where you are. It did not need the overflowing of the Nile, nor the Egyptian Delta, to make Geometry the mother of mathematics. Already, when the first land surveyor measured the length of the ground by the length of his foot or stride, he showed himself more sure of one length than the other. But now another man has stepped the same length of ground, and made it longer. One '56 The New Word foot is not the same as another foot. It is time to measure what you measured by, and make assurance doubly sure. In the end some unknown Andronikos arose, and said, Let us forget there was ever real ground, or a real foot, or a real pair of human, or of compass, legs, and make believe that we are measuring Pure Ground with Pure Measures. And he called his science, or his language, Pure Assurance. Now here is Idealism in its nakedness. I do not mean that it is the idealism of our Testator. I do not claim this bequest for works of a mathematical tendency. But as it was in the mind of Plato, so this is in the general mind, the embryo of idealism, and therefore it cannot be passed by. Ill The first word in Euclid's definition is point. He makes-believe to begin with that. But he can only tell me what a point is by telling me what it is not. Every definition is a not. An outline can only be gained hi battle. The simplest definition follows the yea and nay of electricity, as in the case of truth and verihood. Accordingly Euclid tells me that his point has no size. And in doing so he shows that he expects to The Conjuring Trick 157 find size in my mind already that I know all about size. And thus in the order of the thoughts size comes before the point. In the language of Pure Assurance, Euclid has assumed the three dimensions of space in telling me that his point has none. Which, as he would say himself, is absurd. There is a good deal of absurdity in Euclid. His aim is to make-believe that he is starting with the point. And so instead of working down to it fairly, he pretends to create it. It is another con- juring trick. The juggler claps down his magical dice-box over size, and when he lifts it up, hey presto ! size has vanished, and the point is there instead. In a school-book that is unfair. The abstraction ought to be abstracted before the school-boy's eyes, and not popped on him from up the conjuror's sleeve, as if it were some real thing made of imponder- able Matter. Which, to translate Euclid, is un- heard of. I have to fall back on my humble method of asking what the words mean. I cannot find that point means anything more than end, one end of a line, and so I must at least know what a line is. But line, in its turn, only means edge, the edge of a face ; and face is only side, the side of a block. Thus the words themselves lead me back into the world of size, a world of three measurements, the real world in which I am accustomed to live. I can now, if I am asked to do so, make-believe to forget the block and think only of the side ; to forget that and think only of the edge ; to forget that and think only of the end, as I can to forget the end and think of '58 nothing. And it is by such steps that this venerable quack ought to have brought his flats and lines and points before my mind's eye, when I was twelve years old. r I We have not Euclid's handwriting before us, and we know that Mediterranean copyists sometimes take freedoms with their text. One of Euclid's copyists seems to have felt that there was something false about the point, and he has tried to mend matters by saying that a point is that which has position. I am reminded rather painfully of a certain Energy of Position which gave us some trouble a short way back. To say that a point has position is to say that it is fixed ; and you cannot fix a point without having at least one other point to fix it by : and as soon as you have got two points side by side you have got a line. And so we work back by another road to the real starting-point, the point from which the science of fanciful Earth-Measure did indeed start, namely the solid earth. Euclid has put the cart before the horse. Which is unheard of. I am not ashamed to say that I have found more sense in a child's riddle than in all Euclid's defini- tions though they are also in their way a child's riddle. It runs, How many sides has a round plum-pudding ? And the answer is Two, an out- side and an inside. Because the science of Earthmeasure is the science of measuring shapes, and the child's plum-pudding is the truth about shape. It is the shape of the All-Thing as well as of the atom. It is, if I must The Conjuring Trick 159 wield these enchanted weapons, the shape of space itself the mind-shape. The child's plum-pudding brings before us the unreality of all the flats that Euclid deals in, showing us that there is no half- way house between nothing and the whole ball. I am reminded of another famous dogma in which the thundering adjectives roll to and fro, from One to Three, and back from Three to One. All un- awares, perhaps, the mind that gave birth to that mighty inspiration was reasoning from One Space in Three Measures to One God in Three Persons. If it be not the creed of Athanasius it is the creed of Alexandria. Perhaps the minds for whom the word One is the truest word in speech, whether they write it Mono- theism or Monism, are shallower than they think they are. IV Those flats of Euclid's are eye shapes, and their power over the mind is owing, not wholly to the early man's belief in a flat earth, but in some measure to that enlargement of the eye nerves which makes our brain, as it were, lopsided. We like to think in flats ; our explanation is a map. And since the world 160 The New Word is round, the map is false, and what we gain in clear- ness we lose in verihood. Here we are at the heart of this two-thousand- year-old falsehood, these lengths without breadths, these flats without thickness, this whole denial, not merely of strength, but of reality. The science of Pure Earthmeasure is the science of Tidy Shapes. Whereas we know that real shapes are always ever so little untidy ; the ball is not quite round, the face is not quite flat, the line is not quite straight, the point is not so fine as nothing, and it is not quite fixed. As soon as Pure Assurance undertakes to assure us of anything beyond its own purity, lo ! the triangle is no longer equilateral, and the parallel lines run together, and we have to fall back upon the landsurveyor's chain, and use compasses of wood and brass. Alas ! is even the purity of Pure As- surance free from scandal ? Do we not hear of negligeable quantities being brushed aside, as Pure Physics brushes its scandals into the Ether ? Is not the enchanted castle of Pure Earthmeasure haunted by a restless spirit that even the wizards cannot exor- cise, a ghostly circle that will not be squared ? The study of Unreal Measure has been called for ages a training for the mind ; as though the mind The Conjuring Trick 161 were some poor sickly plant that could not grow upward unless it were nailed to a dead stick. The healthy plant grows upward in search of light, be- cause the light draws it upward, and because it needs and feeds on light. Pity for those that cannot bear the light, that creep and cling to their dead stick, and put forth their puny blossoms in the shade. Yet greater pity for those that pine and are denied the light, that climb and are forbidden, that bud and may not flower, for the sound crucified to save the sick. For my part, when I stand outside the Roman forcing-house, and see the gardeners inside training the plants entrusted to their care ; driving their nails, and turning on their Alexandrian gas-jets, and shutting out the day, I watch them with other feelings than reverence. I see the tired heads droop in the foul air ; and I want to break open the door of the forcing-house, and draw forth the nails, and turn out the gas-jets, and let in the light of heaven. Once when I was in Delft I visited the house where William the Silent was murdered by order of the Catholic King. And looking out of a window into the courtyard I saw some flowers in pots standing in a corner over which the shadow of the wall had crept. And while I looked a girl came out into the court- yard, and took up the flowers, one after the other, and moved them out of the shadow into the sun- shine again. Then I said to myself, Lo ! here I have seen the work of William the Silent : he saw the black shadow of Spain creep over his country, and 1 62 The New Word he brought his countrymen out into the light of free- dom again. To me, while I looked, this also seemed to be a work of an idealist tendency. TWELFTH HEAD THE CIPHER The Bottom of the Mind. I. Pure Reason. 2. Burla Burla. 3. Perfect Certainty. 4. The Leak. 5. The Child's Prayer. T)URE Earthmeasure, instead of affording a true JT starting point, has turned out to be a mere balloon arising from the real earth. But there is another land of measure which seems to come before earth- measure, more truly than Euclid's point before his lines and flats. If measure be the handmaid of knowledge, number is the handmaid of measure. Here, surely, we touch bottom ; if not the bottom of the All-Thing, at least the bottom of the mind, so often mistaken for the bottom of the All-Thing. Did not Pythagoras strive to build the All-Thing out of numbers ? And did not the chief architect of the Roman school, Boethius, choose ciphering for his foundation stone ; for the first tread of that curriculum which the imprisoned squirrels turned round so pain- fully in the Logical Age ? 163 164 The New Word Because I shrank from using the Babu word Arith- metic, I cast about for the child's name for the same thing : and no sooner had I written it down than I saw it foretold what I was going to say. For among us the word cipher has come to mean the figure ; and children tell each other that nought stands for nothing. Arithmetic is Pure Reasoning, as the children would have told Kant, if he had stooped to ask them. When they are going to rob a bird's nest, they excuse them- selves by saying that, if they leave one egg in the nest, the bird will not know it has been robbed, because birds cannot count. Of course they do not think the bird is so stupid as that, really ; but they have learned from grown-up people that you can lull your sense of right and wrong to sleep with words ; and the grown-up people have told them that birds have instinct instead of reason. And so they have gone to the point, and put it plainly that birds can- not count. Which is absurd. The greatest Pure Reasoner ever known was not Kant, but Babbage's machine. The Calculating Machine, as its creator named it, not only reckoned more carefully thanVBabbage himself, but when it reached a stage at which new laws of number came into play, laws which had been unknown to Babbage when he The Cipher 165 made it, it discovered those laws for itself, and went right on. That is to say, it was infallible. If it be the peculiar distinction and glory of man that he is the reckoning animal, one sees that Bab- bage did a far more wonderful thing than was thought of by the learned men who hoped that they could create life out of the contents of a chemist's shop. Because all they hoped to create was the lowest kind of life ; in their own words, the protozoon, or forelife ; whereas Babbage created the highest kind of life ; as it should seem, the afterlife, ta meta ta phusika in very deed ! In many ages and countries Babbage's machine would have been worshipped as a god. In the age from which we are escaping it would have been burnt for witchcraft. And yet all the time this reasoning creature could not have told its creator how many buttons he had on his waistcoat. It was much stupider than the birds. It could only go on saying what Babbage told it to say. It had no going strength ; no soul. It would be easy to make a more energetic machine than Babbage's, out of a mill wheel and a roll of paper, which would go on multiplying by ten, by the simple process of stamping noughts on the paper, as long as the paper lasted and the stream ran. In- deed, the Buddhists long ago took a far higher flight than Babbage, with their famous praying-wheel, which says a prayer every time the wheel turns round, and so may fairly lay claim to being Pure Religion. 1 66 The New Word ii Here then is the ogre at last, in his true shape. Pure Ciphering is the last word, or, verily speaking, the first word, in the Andronican lexicon. If there be such a thing as metaphysics, ciphering is Pure Metaphysics. It is the science of Absolute Truth, of Verihood By Itself. I cannot show this better than by means of a saying which has always been revered as a sample of Absolute Truth, a foundation-stone of Logic, a genuine fulcrum for the human mind. It is put forward as such by Descartes, and it is still popular in quarters where Descartes has always been un- popular Two and two are jour. It is hard for one whose mind is childlike, and all untrained in exact reasoning, to take this aged play upon words quite seriously. Nevertheless, in case there should be still some sleep-walkers abroad, not able to withstand this kind of conjuring, I have taken the trouble to ask myself a question, Suppose there should be savages who had got distinct names only for two or three numbers, and whose name for four was consequently " two and two ", would not this unanswerable proposition then stand thus, Two and two are two and two ? I made the practical experi- ment ; I went to a book about savages, and sure The Cipher 167 enough I found that among the Queensland black- fellows the name for two is burla, and the name for four is burla burla. '$ And so now, copying the pleasant vein of a dis- tinguished Mediterranean cardinal, I am able to pic- ture a Queensland champion of Positivism calling his dusky congregation round him, and addressing them in this wise : " My brethren, I grieve to hear that some among us have denied that the Kangaroo in the Moon ought rightly to be called a Kangaroo. And I find that they have fallen into this distressing heresy through doubting if there be such a thing as Abso- lute Truth known to men. Let me therefore, while the secular arm is making ready the faggots, silence these unhappy infidels ; and confirm the wavering faith of such as still wish to believe ; by reminding them and you of this unalterable, this irrefragable, this Untied Truth By Itself, Burla and burla, at all times and in all places, and to all men and kangaroos, are burla burla ! " That little fable may help us to understand the difference between the kind of Absolute Truth which was known even to Babbage's machine, and the kind of Absolute Truth which has to fall back on faggots for Absolute Proof. 1 68 The New Word in There is a very famous art or mystery of ciphering in words which has been known for more than two thousand years as Logic. Very many treatises have been, and are still being, written on this art, but when we look into them we find that no two of them are agreed as to what Logic is, or what it does, or how it ought to do it. The learned and distinguished writers have fared no better than the members of the Metaphysical Society. And I am afraid the reason is the same in both cases. They have not asked what the word itself meant. Logic sounds like the Babu for wordiness. But it also means orderliness. It is connected with law, much as arithmetic is connected with rhythm. Now the history of logic is the history of an attempt to make an arithmetic of words. The aim of the logicians has been to learn from words instead of things. They have sought for what they call certainty, or Perfect Certainty, which is of course our old friend Absolute Truth or Pure Assur- ance under another name. And they have believed that they could arrive at it by the tidy arrangement of words. Their grand achievement has been the syllogism, which is, as its name half confesses, a mere saying The Cipher 169 again. To use their own language, every logical proposition is an identical proposition. The reason- ing machine can only say what its creator tells it to say. You cannot get more out of the words than you have put into them ; as the logicians themselves confess altogether when they say that the conclusion must be contained in the premises. And the more tidily the premises are arranged, the more self-evident the conclusion will be, till Pure Logic attains to Per- fect Certainty in Burla burla. In the old conjuring books one meets this kind of thing as a specimen of what the logical mind believes to be proof : All men are mortal : Socrates is a man : Therefore Socrates is mortal. Now that is quite true. But it is not a proof of anything ; it is merely a vain repetition. If all men are sure to die, then in saying that Socrates is a man you have said that he is sure to die. If not, the syllogism would stand thus All who are not sure to die are sure to die : Socrates is one who is not sure to die : Therefore Socrates is sure to die. Which is absurd. There is no such thing as logical proof. Demonstra- tion is not proof, it is pointing out, and pure reason is the pointing out of pure samenesses, like those of arithmetic and measure. Logic does this in words, and the better it does it, the more the words them- selves will be the same, till they end by saying nothing at all. 1 70 The New Word As soon as we pass from words to things, we find that we are dealing not with samenesses but with likenesses. The art of pointing them out in words is called by the logicians rhetoric ; and perhaps the greatest triumph of rhetoric has been in persuading mankind that there is such a thing as logic. But all the time the surest demonstration is that which points out the thing itself ; and, if we may believe the greatest of all rhetoricians, the surest rhetoric is that which moves the man himself by other means than words. For all this time there has to be a man. It is because Demosthenes declared the secret of oratory to be the orator's thump upon the table, that I believe this bag of gold thrown down among the logicians will refute all their syllogisms, and that, a stronger than I having thumped the table, I am adding these few words. IV My slight acquaintance with treatises on logic leads me to the conclusion that the art was invented by some one living among savages whose minds were incapable of distinguishing between puns and sense. The writers are all hard at work refuting the nursery riddle When is a door not a door ? When it is ajar. That riddle, I think, like other things one hears in the nursery, must be a relic, what Darwin calls a The Cipher 171 rudiment, of old cannibal metaphysics. It is the kind of thing that would have made the fortune of a Greek sophist, or a Roman theologian, or a modern physicist. When is The Good not good ? When it is an abstract noun. When is bread not bread ? When it is a grin. When is elastic not elastic ? When it is a scientific conception. In so far as the tidy arrangement of words helps us to tell sense from nonsense, logic is a useful part of grammar. If it pretended to be nothing more, I should not have found it in my path in this inquiry. The brazen serpent made by Moses in the wilder- ness, (in seeming carelessness of his Commandments) was very well as a cure for snake-bites. But when the people were found burning incense to it in the house of Yahweh, it was time to call it not Snake but Brass, and to break it in pieces. Logic is such a medicine, and the people are burn- ing incense to it in the house of Verihood. They are mistaking samenesses in words for samenesses in things. The mistake is made in theology, it is made in morality, it is made by the lawyers, it is made by the scientists. Logic is like a straight line which can only touch the round of verihood at one point. The farther you prolong the line, the farther you are going from verihood. The definitions break down ; the efforts to enclose reality in words run into endless decimals. There is a perpetual flaw which cannot be patched up. There is a leak which cannot be stopped. The lawyers cannot stop the leak with all their codes and cases ; nor the theologians with all their General The New Word Councils and their Privy Councils ; nor the moral- ists with all their altruism ; nor the materialists with all their Ether and Ethereon, their necessary assump- tions and their scientific conceptions. That is the answer to the spell of the enchanters ; when men have taken to heart that lesson the enchantment will be broken, and the Mediterranean nightmare will vex sleep no more. The more Logic is asked to do, the worse it does it. Pure Reckoning is seen at its best in the Multi- plication Table. It is seen at its worst in such a would-be science as Political Economy. There are two schools of this science, known respectively as Individualists and Socialists. Their conclusions are diametrically opposed ; both are thoroughly logical, and both are thoroughly wrong. Both take it for granted that men are right-angled triangles ; and set- ting out hi opposite directions from this common ground, both end in absurdity. One holds that men are perfectly selfish, and the other that they are perfectly unselfish ; but both are agreed that men are perfectly wise. A world of men who were all ruled by enlightened selfishness would be a heaven, more so, perhaps, than a world of men ruled by enlightened unselfishness. Unhappily the case is that most men are intensely stupid. Some of them may be more selfish, and others more unselfish, but stupidity is master of them all, and master of the world. The Cipher 173 Is there, then, nothing to be done ? Surely there is. Once when I was seated in one of our public plea- sure-grounds a little fellow, whose hoop had got bent out of shape, ran up to me and asked, " Please, sir, will you make my hoop round." I could not forbear from smiling at the thought that I was being asked to do that which God has not yet done. But I did not tell the little fellow that what he wanted was beyond the power of logic, or mathematics, or physics or metaphysics. Instead, I set to work, and made his hoop round ; that is to say, I made it round enough for him to play with, which was all he wanted. The prayer of that little fellow is still sounding in my ears. I think it has been sounding in them all my life. I hear it coming from many quarters, and in many languages. I hear it in the Fourth Clause of Nobel's Will. THIRTEENTH HEAD THE END Course of the Inquiry. i. The Common Term. 2. A Magical Spark. 3. The Atom of Thought. 4. The Swirl. 5. The Name. course taken by this inquiry is not without _ significance. At the outset it seemed to be going round and round, without drawing nearer to the sought-for end. It has since steadied into the form of a whirlpool, drawing me down in ever narrowing rings until at last the whirl-point is in sight ; and we may foresee that it will turn out to be a starting-point, so that as soon as I have passed through it I shall begin to come up again on the other side. Setting out to discover what books were, in the opinion of no mean judge, most beneficial to man- kind, I found them described by the word Idealist. I had not the endless task of finding what that word meant by itself ; I had to find what the Testator meant by it. I found in the first place, that it was a new word, not yet admitted to the Book of Words, and thus there was no distinct class of books, to which it had already by common usage been applied. 174 The End 175 I found next that it was a half outlandish word, whose birth and history were not enough to guide us as to its meaning. I found again that this would not have mattered if it had named a thing already there, but that it mattered very much when I had got to find a thing to fit the name. I found next that the Testator's word was being used in many meanings which seemed to have little in common with one another. I examined some of them, and found they were not in harmony with the context of the Will. At length I settled upon what seemed to be the common element, or beginning, of all these meanings. I polarised the word Idealist by means of the word Materialist. I found there was a class of books to which the word Materialist had been applied by common usage, and I examined them. As a result this word was melted down to the word Strength. I sought to polarise the word Strength, and I was thrown back upon words of a kind which I had looked into already, and found not in accord with the Testa- tor's general mind. This time I bade them take their true shape, and they appeared as ciphers. Nothing is made up of Ciphers, and Everything is made up of Strength. 176 The New Word The opposite to strength is strength. It is not lack of strength, weakness is only the slack tide of strength. It is not no strength, nothing- ness has neither position nor opposition. It is strength going the other way, as in the yea and nay of the electric atom, as in the force and energy of the mechanical universe, the Ebb and Flow of Everything. The word Power, like so many words used by materialists, is a bad one. Because Power means the same as Potency, and strength is not potential, but kinetic. All force is pulling. All energy is pushing. All strength is Going Strength. As we have seen, the tying up of strength is Matter. And as we have seen again, Matter is wrought by the crossing of two Ways of Strength. It is not the Rest, but the full Strain of the wrestlers the deadlock of those great Twin Wrestlers whose wrestle is the All-Thing. Opposite is also a bad word, because it makes us think in one measure, and we ought to think in three. The right word is inversion, which is to say, in English, turning inside out. The turning inside out of strength is the key to the riddle. It is the key to many other riddles. For rightly to interpret one word is rightly to interpret all words. The End 177 The word Strength, which thus meets us at the end of the enchanted wood, has been with us all the way in many different disguises. The Testator uses it when he asks for works that shall have a tendency. I have used it whenever I have spoken of the mean- ing, that is to say the strength, of a word. Doctor Latham used it in his explanation of Idealism. The Ideas of Plato were imperfect because he forgot to use it. The House of Cards was vainly built with- out it. It was what Pure Reason could not prove. It was included in the inventory of the universe. It was found hidden in the fallen stone, and in the going crumb. It was the subject of Euclid's con- juring trick ; and it was only got rid of at last by Babbage's machine. Strength is the common term, the first word in the idealist, as well as in the materialist, lexicon. It is the word which I find at the core of all words, the one which I cannot explain, but by which I have to explain all others. It is the axle of the wheel of self-knowledge, the end of that whirl which I call my mind. Because it is that, I do not understand it. I use it as a gibberish word. Somewhere we must break off the endless decimal, and put on a dot. Here is where I break off my decimal, and put on my dot. The New Word ii Not very long before I came across Nobel's puzzle, a young friend of mine showed me one evening a common trick. He placed one end of a piece of string in the fire, till there came a red spark, and then whirled the string round so quickly that instead of a spark I saw a fiery ring. And while I watched, it struck me that I had before me at last in its sim- plest form a puzzle which I had often had before .me in other forms, which I had found lurking in many quarters, under much learned language, as I was to find it in Nobel's Will. Here was the question in its fiery shape. If the moving spark made me see the ring, what made me see the spark ? I knew that the ring was only such to the eye, and that if I put out my finger I should not feel a ring. But then I knew farther that this was only because the spark was not going round fast .enough. If it had gone fast enough I should have felt the ring, in the same way as when a wheel goes round fast enough the spokes give a steady pressure. So, if it were true that things like stones and air are made up of tiny crumbs and nothing more, I should have expected to learn that the greater hard- The End 179 ness of the stone was due, not to the greater stillness of its crumbs, but to their greater speed. I should have expected to learn that the air crumbs were going with a soft and gliding pace about their roomy abodes in ether, as heavenly spirits do, while the stone crumbs were banging about in their narrow quarters like angry men on earth. The stone would seem to me more like the sleeping top ; the air like the top running down. In that famous story of the Man in the Crumb, did not the gas get harder as it shrank into less room ? To speak more carefully, the stone would seem to be keeping time with that ever-quickening inward beat of strength which is called Force, and the air with that ever-slowing out- ward beat which is called Energy. All this is said by the word fast itself ; for it means quickly, and yet it also means firm. These common words ought not to be despised. Is not the one thing which the chemists have failed to melt called by the common folk quicklime ? Words like these are reve- lations. They are the hoarded knowledge of a hundred thousand years ; yet no one thinks them worth his care. They are the priceless pearls which we have exchanged like foolish savages for the glass beads from oversea. The guesses of those old learners ought not to be despised. Are not the old elements coming back to us as states of matter ? Perhaps fire is a state of matter. Perhaps it is the next state, not to the air, but to the stone. I know nothing of these things ; I only know that a flame leaves a worse bruise than an iron hammer. At the time when I asked myself these questions i8o The New Word the scientific lexicon held no such words as radium and radio-activity. The only answer I could find to the puzzle was a logical one. I said that the spark must be moving to and from me, going away and coming back, going out and coming alight again. And no sooner had I said that than I turned it the other way about, and put the question : What if it be myself, and not the spark, that is going and coming, passing to and fro between wake and sleep, too quickly for me to catch the beat ? What if that which we call life be such a going out and coming in again, a passing to and fro between this sphere of ours and that Other Dimension whose symbol is not 4, but ; so that each of us dies and comes to life again a million times between breath and breath ? There I had left the question. I put the spark away, as it were, in my mind, and left it. And now I found it waiting for me at the end of this inquiry. Ill I have left out of the story, lest it should grow too long, many strange things that befell me as I came through the enchanted wood. Other adven- tures I had, other goblins I met and laid with Nobel's talisman, but time would fail me to tell of them. Of the last one I will tell. The End 181 The question before me worded itself thus : What is the idealist crumb ? What is the atom of thought ? The logical answer led me back through ciphering, measure and materialism. I thought of one, I thought of a ball-shape, I thought of a real ball. At that stage I recalled the spark and I renewed my former question thus : What is the simplest motion I can give to the ball to make it stand out ? the Babu word is exist. How can the ball be ? My former answer had been, by coming and going, becoming and unbecoming. The ball must move in and out of " existence " too fast for me to feel the gaps. But that was Andronican language I fancy it is to be found in some Andronican book. Tried by the golden touchstone with which Nobel had provided me, it showed itself to be nonsense. All at once I saw that it might easily become very good counter-sense. I recalled to my aid one of the goblins that I had conjured in the enchanted wood, the goblin of ideal dynamite. The fiery shape of that goblin had been, not the kind of dynamite which does not explode, but the kind which interplodes, which shrinks vio- lently instead of swelling violently. I saw that the motion of this ball of mine must be that of shrinking and swelling, shrinking into a point, and swelling into a ball, shrinking towards nothing, and swelling towards Everything. How could a real ball do that ? Of what must such a ball be made ? If it were to say that it was made of pure strength, 1 82 The New Word I might seem to talk like Andronikos of Rhodes. And yet when we looked hard at other balls they faded away before our eyes from crumbs into whirl- rings, and from ether into ethereon, until we drew near to a " perfect fluid " that could not be told apart from pure strength. Again, and since I wrote what goes before, a learner working towards the same point from the other side, has told the story of a thousand balls of pure strength bound within one ball. At the same time, while I had found that I could not understand the word strength, I had yet found it be the most real of all words ; it was the core of the word-book, as it was the core of the atom, and as it was the core of the All-Thing. For rightly to explain the atom is rightly to explain the All- Thing. ; Such, then, and so formed, was the thought-atom which I found in my mind, after ransacking the store- houses of sense, and weeding the garden of language down to a single word. And no sooner had I created it in the way I have described than all at once it seemed to change, and to be in nowise a new idea, but a very old one ; and not to belong to me, but to be a reflection, or, as it were, a composite photograph, of the ideas of those great learners who had explored Everything before me on my behalf. Those vortices of Descartes, those whirlrings in the ether, all seemed to come to- gether and to blend in the ball which I thought that I had shaped. By their means I was enabled to see the ball more clearly and to guess that it might turn out to be, The End 183 not an Andronican creation, but a real ball, a ball of living strength. And since living strength does not shrink and swell along straight lines, I caught a glimpse of mysterious spirals leading inwards and outwards ; and then I knew that this was a magic ball indeed, and that it was far older than the great astronomers, old when there was yet no cleavage between astronomy and astrology between the lore of heaven and the lore of Heaven ; when man felt knowledge flowing in on him from all sides, and counted it all divine ; it was as old as that forgotten voice of the Chaldean whose mystic oracle was conned by the Theurgists in the last hours before the Shadow fell upon mankind : " The God of the World, everlasting, boundless, Young and old, of a spiral Form." IV The figure of strength turning inside out is now before us. It is strength shrinking into a point, and swelling into a ball, the inward beat changing into the outward beat, and the outward back into the inward, as force changes into energy, and energy into force. So far it is merely a mathematical figure. Yet it will serve to mark the first parting of the ways between the Materialist and the Idealist. 184 The New Word v\ The Materialist, as his name betrays, tries to believe in Matter. He does not believe in it, because no man can do so, but his mind is turned matterward. The mind of the Idealist is turned strengthward. The Idealist tries to believe in Untied Strength, com- monly called the Absolute. He does not succeed any better than the Materialist. But that is the way in which the two minds are first opposed. It is the difference between potential and kinetic. And this difference is exhibited in the field of Literature in the difference between the Academician and the Prophet. The Academician cannot write without a meaning, nor the Prophet without words. But the one is turned formward and the other spiritward. However, that distinction is partly unreal. It partakes of the unreality of Matter itself. The real distinction is the unreal one repeated in terms of Strength. As we have seen, the Materialist has given up his mock-belief in Matter, and the Idealist must now give up his mock-belief in the Absolute. The two meet on the common ground of Strength. The mathematical figure of the strength-ball is not other than the figure which has been forming in the mind of great materialist learners. It is in their ways of looking at it that the real difference between the two minds will be found. We cannot think of strength going only one way, or shrinking in any measure without swelling in equal measure. We cannot think of strength going out into the dustbin of Andronicus R/hodius. Nor can we think of it shrinking into the point of Euclid, and staying there. As fast as it whirls inward it The End 185 must swirl outward, and the whirl and swirl must compensate each other. So that the strength-ball ought rightly to be called a Whirl-Swirl. Now the materialist is busy measuring the whirl, and as it seems to me his eyes are sometimes so far dazed by watching it as to be no longer able to mark the swirl. Again his speech bewrays him, when he uses words like whirl and universe, as though he had nothing but a whirlpool before him. One ma- terialist has likened the life of man to a whirlpool. Whereas what we have before us is more like a water- spout, and the spiral of life points upward instead of downward. Now the business of the Idealist is measuring the swirl. This is the real parting of the ways. And the unreality of the other is shown by this, that when the Materialist does enter the field of literature, his work is apt to be unbearably informal, and his words unbearably bad ; and his highest achievement is History ; whereas when the Idealist enters the same field, his work is apt to take on the severe and crystal form of poetry ; his words are apt to be the most careful words ; and his highest achievement is the Parable. And all that is the turning inside out of strength. It seems to me, therefore, that it is the word Swirl which we have been in search of all along, as the interpretation of the word Idealist. I still like it better than radio-activity. The swirl is the inver- sion of the whirl. It is a whirl going the other way. It is to whirl what Energy was to Force. It is a very common word. The children know it well. And 1 86 The New Word yet what sounds too strange for a coincidence the learned Doctor Latham, in his four huge volumes, somehow has succeeded in leaving out this very word. So, after diving through the end of the whirl, I have come up in the swirl, bringing in my hand this poor little forgotten word, shimmering to my eyes like a tiny seed-pearl of verihood, though it should show to other eyes like a glass bead, not worth the fetching up. Let us put this word inside the Testator's word, as the child puts a little candle inside a toy house, and look how it will light it up. My selfish interest in this inquiry has here reached its end. The search for the right name of Idealism has brought me to the right name of Truth. I have found it, not in the tidily arranged and ticketed glass-cases of learned museums, but in the lonely wind-swept barrow of the Viking. I am as one of those who ' ' From grass-grown hills, Their ancient and forgotten burial-places, Draw forth the dragon hoard of gold and gems." And lo ! the right Name is a mighty spell, and no The End 187 sooner is it uttered than Verihood herself is called out of her enchanted sleep ; she stirs, and the vain cerements are rent ; she rises up, and the gravestone is rolled away. Well did they who cast her into that trance, and bound the graveclothes round about her, and set the gravestone in its place, well did they know the might that is in Names. Is it not written in one of the books of the enchanters, " Thou shalt not take my Name in vain ; " and in another, " Lo ! dreadful faces show, and, threatening Troy, The mighty Names of Gods." Magical lore is this : the secret lies here : I also am a magician ; I understand that other oracle of the Chaldeans " Never change native Names ; For there are Names in every nation, God-given, Of untold power in the Mysteries." FOURTEENTH HEAD THE MAGIC CRYSTAL Pure Verihood. i. The Art of Speech. 2. The Sign. 3. The Shape. 4. The Symbol. 5. Ideal Dynamite. SO far the whirl-swirl is a mathematical figure. That is to say it is a word, like Euclid's triangle. It is Pure Verihood. To be more than a word it must take shape. Veri- hood must put on falsehood ere it can dwell among us. The outline must be gained in battle. It is my business to write this word more distinctly, knowing that what we gain in clearness we must lose in verihood. So, even a work of an idealist tendency cannot be quite true, because literature cannot be quite true. We can only draw the round by drawing a series of overlapping straight lines. We can only paint light by painting the shadows cast by light. We can only give to our God the figure of an Idol. Is not that why the perfect Idealist uttered his cryptic saying, " They who know do not tell ; they who tell do not know." 188 The Magic Crystal 189 These words which I am writing, and you are reading, these black marks upon white paper, are only signs for sounds, as the crotchets and quavers on a sheet of music are. And the sounds themselves are also in their turn signs for strength, in this case the strength within me, which is called feeling. I write this book to show you my feeling, to make you feel how I feel. It is a cheque drawn on your mind. Words are, like money, a medium of exchange, and the sureness with which they can be used varies not only with the character of the coins themselves, but also with the character of the things they are offered for, and that of the men who tender and receive them. When we consider that the value of the British sovereign changes from day to day in Britain itself, and when we read the books in which political economists pursue their endless task of trying to tell us what is wealth, we shall wonder no longer at the wasted toil of the logicians. But words are not the only medium of exchange, any more than gold and silver are. In Nigerland the coins most in use are slaves and cowrie shells. So, in wild lands, and in old days, men have told each other how they felt by other means than words. Music is one such means. Another is the mystic 190 The New Word dance. A black man who was asked concerning some religious thought answered, " I do not dance that dance." The dervish dances his worship of the Wheel of Heaven. The Christian kneels to show he is afraid of God. That Roman critic who con- demned tragedies in which the knot was cut by a god coming out of a machine, forgot why the word tragedy meant Goat-Song ; forgot that the tragedy was a Mystery whose very end it was to show the god's power over men ; forgot that the Song of the Goat began when the stargroup called the Goat led forth the great dance of the constellations, as it is written in the Samaritan copy of Genesis, " In the beginning the Goat created the heaven and the earth." Machines are a clumsy kind of writing, but tragedy is still the play that shows men overcome by a power outside them, greater than themselves. The language of clothes still lingers in our palaces and churches, our courts and barracks. The lan- guage of the arms and hands is only frozen by the long northern nights. Letters themselves are half- breeds, degenerate pictures merging into signs. Writ- ing flowered in the sculptural hieroglyphs of Egypt, as afterwards in the illuminated missals of the monks. But it began in rude notches on a stick, and rude knots on a thread, serving, as knots on handker- chiefs still serve the children, as reminders. The picture that reminds us is a Sign. Before I draw the outline of the whirl-swirl, I will draw its sign. The Magic Crystal 191 II The Cross is the rude picture of a knot. As such it is the sign of Matter ; and the Man on the Cross signifies the thought that Matter is Evil. The Cross by itself is pure ugliness. The Man on the Cross is a tremendous allegory, whose full interpretation has yet to come. The root significance of the Cross is not altered because it has also signified other things to other minds ; to some, the crossing of the sun from south to north at Easter, to others a material Cross on which Rome in the flesh impaled Idealism in the flesh. The men who adopted the Cross as the sign of the religion which that Idealist has been accused of founding, were men whose habit of mind led them to look for more than one meaning in signs. For them the heaven and the earth abounded in double meanings, in what I will call ontological puns. The days of the week were seven, the moving planets were seven, the stars in the Plough were seven, and the number seven was sacred for all these reasons put together. By such frail supports they groped their way towards truths which we have since learned and measured, so that their mistakes are prophecies. The Cross is the Sign of Matter, and as such it 192 The New Word reminds us of the nature of Matter. Not only is it the rude picture of a knot, that is to say, of a joint in the network, but it shows us how the knot is made. It is by two lines of string meeting crosswise. Thus it reminds us that two Ways of Strength must meet crosswise to become entangled. And their entangle- ment is their arrest. We know they do not rest. The strain of forward motion turns into the strain of pressure. The soldiers do not halt, but they mark time, and mark it faster than they marched. The wrestlers tremble as they lock. The imprisoned crumbs beat their incalculable wings against the cage. The word fast is true in its prophetic mean- ing. Nevertheless the word fast is also true in its his- torical meaning. The net which stops the way is in itself wrought by a stoppage of the Ways of Strength. The nature of Matter is Fixity, and it has no more ultimate nature than this. The ultimate nature of Materialism is the worship of Fixity, under a hun- dred names, whether Matter or Shape, Exactness or Certainty, or Rest or Death. The enemy of Fixity is Change. What is the sign of Change ? The Chinese sign for Everything is a point in the middle of a round. Viewed as still figures this sign and the Cross offer the utmost unlikeness to one another. But both are still figures ; to be the sign of Change, the Round ought to be turning into the End, and returning into the Round. The wheel of the Buddhists is a better sign. But the motion of the wheel is not the full motion of the The Magic Crystal 193 Whirl-swirl, in which wheels pass into lesser wheels, and back again into greater wheels. The least false sign that I can draw is a line turn- ing from a round into an end, and back again into a round. The line going inward is the whirl, and the line coming outward is the swirl. It goes in black and comes out white. And according as a man judges the black line or the white to be more real, he writes himself Materialist or Idealist. Is it not written in the book of the perfect Idealist that the hollow within the bowl is more to be regarded than the bowl, inasmuch as the bowl is made for the sake of the hollow. I find that I have drawn a Spring. Ill From the language of Measure we rise to that of Matter ; the Sign grows to a Shape. Let us begin from the real thing from which the likeness is to be withdrawn, namely the waterspout, How does a waterspout behave ? 194- The New Word The story of the waterspout, as it is told in books, shows it to be a brief-lived tree. A cloud is whirl- ing downwards, and thrusting out its whirlpoint towards the sea, like a sucking mouth. The sea below whirls upward, thrusting out its whirlpoint towards the cloud. The two ends meet, and the water swept up in the sea-whirl passes on into the cloud-whirl, and swirls up through it, as it were gain- saying it. So in a tree the sap whirls upward from the roots into the trunk, and then again swirls up- ward into the boughs and leaves, meeting the air and light. In the ideal waterspout, not only does the water swirl upward through the cloud-whirl, but the cloud swirls downward through the sea- whirl. To make their passage through each other easier for the trained mind to follow, let us change the water into air, and the cloud into ether. The ideal waterspout is not yet complete. The upper half must unfold like a fan, only it unfolds all round like a flower-cup ; and it does not leave the cup empty, so that this flower is like a chrysan- themum. At the same time the lower half has un- folded in the same way, till there are two chrysan- themums, back to back. In one the air is whirling inward, and the ether swirling outward ; in the other it is the ether that whirls, and the air that swirls. Now let us change the air into ether, and the ether into ethereon, and so on into more and more " perfect fluids," till we have pure strength whirling in on all sides, and swirling out again. It is the pure Shape, reached by the same road by The Magic Crystal 195 which the mathematician reaches his flats and lines. It is the grin without the cat. It is the ideal whirl- swirl. It is strength turning inside out. Such is the true beat of strength, the first beat, the one from which all others part, the beat which we feel in all things that come within our measure, in ourselves, and in our starry world, the beat that is called Action and Reaction. Yet this ideal is not yet an idol. The whirl-swirl is not truly formed into a ball. Every real ball we know of has an outline ; but this one has no outline, except eternity. How shall we clothe it with a skin ? IV What is a real skin ? It is Matter. It is indeed a network through whose pores encompassing strength flows in and out. The heat waves reach the blood, the light waves break through the eyeball into the brain ; others, more subtle, to which we have not yet given names, touch the invisible membranes of undis- covered cells within. The mathematical skin is Time. The whirl-swirl ebbs and flows between the turning-point within and the returning-point without, and the moment at which the swirl changes into the whirl is its outline. To be real, the outline must be gained in battle. 196 The New Word And since the battle must go on all round at once, it must be waged against another whirl-swirl, greater than the first one, and inclosing it. If the cloud had inclosed the water, or the ethereon the ether, the inner whirl-swirl would have been shaped into a ball. If both the inner and the outer whirl-swirls are of pure strength, and both keep the same time, shrink- ing and swelling together, then one will not feel the other. Where there is no resistance there is no existence, and so the two whirl-swirls will be one. And that is the demonstration of the Nirvana of the Buddhists. But both do not keep the same time, any more than the waves of the incoming tide all reach the same height upon the shore. The farthest wave, as it ebbs back, meets the next wave flowing forward ; and so the outer strength, as it whirls inward from its longer period, meets the inner strength swirling outward, and resisting it. And that meeting is a real outline. The inner whirl-swirl is created. Again, the pressure of the greater whirl-swirl rolls up the inner one into less room ; and what is lost in room is gained in time. The beat of the inner whirl- swirl is quickened, and quickness is hardness. And in this greater hardness of the inner strength we have the very difference between ethereon and ether, be- tween ether and " ponderable matter." Strength has foamed into stuff. Consider this idea. Consider this inner strength, coming and going, turning and returning, millions of beats in every tick of secular time, while, throb- The Magic Crystal 197 bing through the network woven by their meeting, the over-strength comes and goes faster than flashes in a diamond. It is no longer a mere word. It is a magic crystal, and by looking long into it, you will see wonderful meanings come and go. It will change colour like an opal while you gaze, reflecting the thoughts in your own mind. It is a most chameleon-like ball. It has this deeper magic that it will show you, not only the thoughts you knew about before, but other thoughts you did not know of, old, drowned thoughts, hereditary thoughts ; it will awaken the slumbering ancestral ghosts that haunt the brain ; you will remember things you used to know and feel long, long ago. What do you see in the magic crystal ? Do you see the Atom, the only real one, the point of strength within the All-Strength ? Do you see the crumb, the tiny crystal that breathes ever so faintly, swelling and shrinking too slightly for our measures, while in and out of it there throbs that beat of strength we call attraction and repul- sion ? Do you see the sun's orb, not fixed as we suppose, but nearly in the middle of our sun-whirl, swelling and shrinking in great tides of fire, while it breathes in and out those throbs that we call Energy and Force ? Or is it this planet that you see, not al- together weaned, but clinging like a suckling to its mother's breast, drinking in life, and giving it forth again ? Ourselves, involved in the vast cocoon of silken light, do we not seem to other eyes, watching 198 The New Word from other orbs, to be flame-spirits moving in a burn- ing world ? Is it the mite you see, the tiny life-crumb, fire- begotten, water-born, air-fed, earth-clad, of which we know neither the beginning nor the end ? Is it the seed, feeding upon the earth-strength, and sending it forth again in roots and shoots ? Is it the living waterspout, through which strength courses to and fro from leaves to roots, and back again to leaves ; is it the Tree Yggdrasil ? Or is it rather the cell, swelling and shrinking within the body-strength, while within the cell there swells and shrinks the nucleus, and within that the nucleolus, and within that what lesser nucleolites we have not measured ? Suppose it is yourself. Suppose it is your heart that pants and throbs, while through it the blood whirls in and swirls out in systole and diastole. Sup- pose it is your inner strength, swelling and shrink- ing along its nervous tracery, while through it the great Outer-Strength comes and goes, coming in sense, and going in emotion. That word emotion is not an Andronican cipher. It means outgoing. It means the swirl. Those old men who used it first knew well enough what it meant. They were not sleep-walkers as we are. Suppose we say it is the Strength Within, played upon by the Strength Without. Suppose we say, in words we hardly understand, that what we call the Body is a network woven between the tiny Strength Within and the great Strength Without. The Magic Crystal 199 I have drawn near to certain old familiar words, which once were good and beautiful. But they are become so deeply tarnished by evil use, so bent and battered, that I dare not use them ; for if I were to, I should feel that I was no longer trying to write truly. On the other hand it seems to me that as fast as some words are becoming ugly and meaningless, other words long deemed ugly and meaningless are becoming beautiful and full of meaning. The old confused cries of the savage are changing into prophecies ; and one fairy tale succeeds another. The earth is turning eastwards, and certain stars are going down below the horizon, while other bright forgotten Signs are rising on us out of the deep. Yet it is still the same earth and the same heaven. This is the virtue of the magic crystal in which each one sees himself. It is a touchstone of words. It is, as I have said, itself a word. How shall I find courage to offer it to those great learners who have built the glorious temple they call Science, wherein I see them standing like arch- bishops at the altar, talking with God ; while I am no more than the little ragamuffin who has been put outside to clean the steps ? I have not listened to 200 The New Word them as I ought. Even in the last age there was a boy outside on the steps, looking on, and thinking his own thoughts, while the archbishops within were muttering solemnly their Mediterranean in- cantations ; and when they came to the heart of their mystery, and recited the words Hoc est corpus, the boy outside repeated to himself Hocus pocus. That was how the Mediterranean words sounded to him. But now suppose that boy has found a seed-pearl, or what he thinks may be a seed-pearl, on the steps ; what must he do ? He knows it is not his. He knows the great archbishop must have dropped it from his jewelled robes, as he was passing in. So all the boy can do is to go up to the archbishop as he comes out again, and say, " Please, sir, is this yours ? " And lest my archbishops should not understand the street boy's words, and should not recognise their seed-pearl, I will name it for their sakes by an archbishop's word. That is to say, Metastrophe. By this word I mean more than the archbishops have meant by their word metabolism. I mean, not growth and decay, but growth turning into decay, and decay turning into growth. I mean involution in the midst of evolution. I mean life turning inside out. And I mean more than life ; I mean also the expression of life. Metasfcrophe is a mood, and in so far as we attain this mood, so will the Strength Within us chime more and more sweetly with the Strength Without ; not in dead unity, but in living The Magic Crystal 201 unison, and the faint gladness of our earthly voices climb and thread the thunder music rolling out of Heaven. Here is ideal dynamite that shall break up the bony knobs that clog the brain, and set thought free. I cast this little seed into the mind. If it be a true life-seed, I have no fear but that it will take root and grow. It will be slower than the other kind of dynamite ; it may take a thousand years ; but it will do its work more surely in the end. For it is stronger than the real dynamite. It is alive. It will grow. FIFTEENTH HEAD THE ELF Idealist Science. i. Oneself. 2. The Changeling. 3. The Gospel of Imagination. 4. The Parable of Life. WE have now made the passage from thoughts to things, or from words to reality. The whirl-swirl is no longer a mathematical figure. We have found it embodied within a greater Whirl- Swirl, without which it could not be. So far I have spoken of these two realities as the Strength Within and the Strength Without. The names in vulgar use are Soul and God. We see already that it is not the task of the Idealist to prove that there are such things as a Soul and a God. Even if there could be such a thing as proof, it could not prove the beginnings of proof. These are the two points from which we begin to reckon. They are the elements of the mind. To try to prove them is like trying to lift the fulcrum by means of the lever. In establishing these two forethoughts I have worked, not as an idealist, but as an ontologist as a learner 202 The Elf 203 of what words mean. I have been cutting open words and looking inside them, no more than that. The science of the Idealist, like that of his partner, the Materialist, begins with the relationship between these two Strengths. Science is closer knowledge, and all knowledge is of relations. As I have said, we measure strength by measuring its ways ; and those ways are outlined for us by other ways that meet them. The famous command, Know Thyself, is meaningless as it stands, because we can only know the Strength Within by knowing its relations with the Strength Without. Hence Berkeley's puzzle for the atheists was itself the only perfect atheism, inasmuch as it denied the Strength Without. The two great sciences which meet in my own science measure these relations from opposite points, and that is the right distinction between them. There is a vulgar distinction between them, which ought to be done away with, namely as to the relations which they measure. I may illustrate both by means of the noble saying, " The Word of God is the creation we behold." Uttered by the devout Thomas Paine as a rebuke to the idolaters of Mediterranean manuscripts, that saying is true. But it is not the whole truth. It is just one-fourth of the truth. As we have seen, the Outer Strength flows in and out of the Inner Strength, whirling as sense, and swirling as emotion. The swirl is as much a revelation as the whirl, and Ideal science is the science of emotion. It is because the manuscripts are a precious record of emotion, 2O4 The New Word that they deserve to be called a revelation, though not to be worshipped as the only revelation. In the second place the creation we behold is not the complete record of the whirl. Of course I do not confine the meaning of the word behold to sight. But it is vulgarly confined to those ways of strength which are detected by the outward organs known as the five senses, or, more carefully speaking, to those ways whose impressions are recorded by the body distinctly enough for us to read. We know that with our narrow sense scale we can only measure a few ways of strength. We mark, as it were, the movement of the minute-hand upon the dial of the All-Thing. But far outside our measures there lags an hour-hand whose slow crawl across utter space shows like changelessness ; and far within them there quickens a second-hand whose trip is like a sleep. From time to time Material science takes new ways of strength into her field of measurement ; till when they are exploited by the ignorant. And hence the vulgar error which ranks such thoroughly material quests as those of the mesmerist, the spiritualist and the faith-healer, because they are not acknowledged by Material science, as branches of Ideal science. With such things, true or false, the Idealist has little more to do than with wireless telegraphy or radiant Matter. If there should prove hereafter to be a real Death-Shape, or as the learned might proceed to name it, Necromorph, able to com- municate with the living, it could be recognised as a physical organism, and its powers and functions The Elf 205 would fall to be investigated by a new branch of physical biology to be called, perhaps, Necrology. Meanwhile the Idealist has more important business in hand. His business is measuring the swirl. His science is the science of expression. And hence the point he measures from is the turning point Within. I seem to be in the same case with the wild man who said there was a man inside the steam-engine, and with the learned men who thought there was a man inside their stones and crumbs although they would not say so. I have been talking of the Inner Strength, when I meant the Man Inside. It is a very common case to be in, though few of us are so frank about it as the wild man. We have seen how hard the chemists and the physicists tried to hide their men, and how cunningly Euclid hid the man who moved his flying triangle. Man, as Protagoras put it, is the measure of Everything. That is the human equation which no Copernicus can do away with. Man measures all things from himself and by himself ; and he speaks most truthfully, though never truly, when he openly confesses his infirmity in his words. 206 The New Word Many efforts have been made to call the Man Inside by Andronican names. I have heard him called the Ego, and I have made the not very difficult discovery that Ego is a Latin word which means I. Whereas the right name would be rather Me-Ego, the Me facing toward the whirl, and the Ego facing toward the swirl. Again I have heard this Man called the Will, which is again the swirl-face without the whirl- face. And I have seen the Will likened to the rudder of a ship. A simile, according to the old logicians, is no argument. There is, unfortunately for them, no other argument, except the thump upon the table. But a bad simile is a bad argument, and I think this of the Will and rudder the worst simile ever used. Only a landsman could have thought of it. A sea- man knows that as soon as the Helmsman's hand is taken from the helm, the rudder is the most strength- less part of the ship. It is not even a part of the ship. It is something towed behind. There is a far more wonderful word than Will, and a far more beautiful ; although for a long time many good men have been at work making-believe that it is a very ugly word, and calling it all manner of hard names. I mean Self. In dealing with this word I seem to have a free hand, for the last word of philology on it is " The origin is unknown." When I look into it, it opens like a flower-bud, revealing undreamt-of petals. It must behave like that, because it is the seed of words, the first entry in the real lexicon. Let us not think of word-lore as fixed, nor of words as dead flowers stuck into a book. Let us not think The Elf 207 of even their shells as artificial carpentry, like the false coins daily issuing from the Babu mint, or the unheard-of exercises of language-makers. Even the Roman words that have struck true roots into our northern speech did so because they found congenial soil ; the water ran where there were channels for it ; the marriages were between far-off kinsmen. And so the new clothes partly followed the old fashions, and the old clothes partly followed the new. Let us thank philology, and beware of it. Some one has guessed that Self is shortened from soul-elf. Now the good men who have said such hard things about Self, are very fond of Soul. What then is Soul ? The learned Latham gives me the old spelling sawel, and leaves me there, with " explanations " which require to be explained by soul. I find the Dutch write it ziel, which makes me think of zeal. But this philology will not allow. English philology has a particular spite against the Dutch, almost as much as against " provincial " English. It chooses rather to track zeal through French and Latin back to the Greek zeo, to seethe and boil. And after it has taken all this trouble, it next proceeds to track soul back through a Gothic form of sea to an imaginary Aryan root su, which means much the same thing. So that the Soul is an empty bubble after all. And what have the good men been doing, then, all this time, in honouring the Soul above the Self, They have kept the bubble, and let go the elf. What a materialistic thing to do ! This Soul of theirs is barren steam ; it is not life, but energy of motion ; 208 The New Word and so we are rather steam-engines than men. Why have these good men stunned their minds and ours with such an ugly word ? The word Soul is an ugly word. For though exact philology may be wrong as usual, and soul be neither zeo nor suein, but rather zoe, the strength within the beast, and not the strength within the kettle, yet the Greeks themselves had found a better name than that for the Man Inside. They named him psyche, the breather, and on their tombs they drew him as a butterfly escaping from the chrysalis. What did our forefathers name him ? Self cannot be soul-elf. That S is far more likely to be the same S that we find in the Latin se, and at the end of English words like his and yours the sign of ownership. If that is right, the Self would be the Own-Elf, and oneself another way of writing one's elf. Consider this. That mathematical strength-ball that we drew so carefully was all the while an Elf, hiding in scientific language. Our forefathers had better taste in words than we have. That little elf was their idea. We see him peeping on us, and passing out of sight, between the pages of the child's Bible those old folk tales that were our Bible once, before the Roman steam-roller had had its way over the Baltic brain. The fairy word goes on unfolding. To me that elf looks very much like life. One's Life, I hold to be the best interpretation of Self. But one philologist tells me that " elf " is aelf, or half, and another that " life " is a remnant, the Icelandic Ufa, what is left. The Elf 209 And so if there be any truth in lexicons, the Inner and the Outer Strength are named by these old words one's Own-Half and the Other-Half the two Halves of the All-Thing. If that be so, the poor, despised, imprisoned Baltic mind was, after all, more subtle than the Mediter- ranean mind. Perhaps, during that long time that the Mediterranean mind has been swaggering up and down the world, ferule in hand, dictating to us of points and atoms, universe and unit, the Baltic mind has been secretly whispering to itself Half. Such are those old, prophetic words. Such are the jewels, glowing with all the colours of the rain- bow, which we have flung away to clutch the ultra- montane beads. To me these words seem flowers, which have been snatched from children's hands, and trodden underfoot, but which have seeded in the dust, and are ready to spring up again, and gladden our jaded senses with somewhat of the freshness of the f oreworld. They are very old. We do not know how old that little elf is.j^He is older than Thor and Woden, older than Jupiter and Yahweh, older, it may be, than the Baltic and Mediterranean seas, as old as life itself. 2io The New Word ii The question of the beginning of One's-Life is the question whether life comes from death, or death from life ; and I find this question cannot be answered either way so as to please good men. Down to about three hundred years ago, every one, good and bad alike, seems to have thought that dead meat could turn into live maggots by itself. Then the Florentine doctor, Redi, showed that dead meat did not turn into live maggots by itself ; and he did so very easily, by putting a piece of gauze over the dead meat, and thus keeping off the flies that had laid the eggs that had turned into the live maggots in the meat. This was not Logic, nor Absolute Proof, but it persuaded most people that dead meat did not turn into live maggots by itself. Now by doing this Redi gave great pain to the good men. They charged him with having limited the power of the Omnipotent. The words seem to unsay themselves ; how can you put bounds to the strength of the All-Strong ? but that is what the good men said Redi had done by putting a piece of gauze between the flies and the dead meat. Next, after a good many years, some other learners thought that Redi might have been mistaken ; and The Elf 211 they put some dead hay into a bottle, and hoped that it would turn into live mites by itself. You would have thought that the good men who had been so vexed with Redi would have been very pleased with these doubters. Not at all. They were even more angry with them than they had been with Redi. They charged them with trying to dispense with the power of Omnipotence. Think of that ; doing with- out the strength of All Strength ! Which of these Andronican crimes shall I commit ? I think it will be easier to set bounds to the Strength Without than to do away with it altogether. Indeed, I cannot see what is gained by bestowing life on man with the words free-will, and taking it away again with the word omnipotence. How can there be All-Strength and some more strength ? If it be true that we are living, would it not be using better words to say that the Strength Without has partly turned into the Strength Within, which we know as our own strength, and has so far set bounds, how- ever weak, to its own strength. In that old story of creation did not the Creator breathe his own Breath into the Man ? When we look into the question between Redi and those who doubted him, we find very naturally that it has really been, not whether dead hay can turn into live mites by itself, but whether the hay can be really dead, and whether the bottles can be sealed closely and carefully enough to keep out those life-seeds called spores which swarm in the air. If I were to see hay turning into live mites by itself, I should not call the hay dead. I should guess that 212 The New Word it had held life-seeds too small for us to kill. And I might go on to guess that all that which we name " inorganic Matter " was made up of such life-seeds ; immeasurable eddies in the whirl-swirl that are still hidden beneath the skirts of sense. Instead of speaking, as we now speak, of the quick and the dead, it seems to me we shall soon have to speak of the quicker and the slower. Is not this the meaning, and is not this the re-writing more carefully, of that old Rosicrucian language about the sylphs and nymphs and gnomes and salamanders ? When we ask the learned for the beginning of life they show us a wonderful little creature which they name in their bad language amoeba. The amoeba is a little ball of quickstuff which rolls along the sea- floor, and as it rolls it feeds on things still smaller than itself. And the way it feeds is this ; as soon as it touches what it is going to feed on, it turns inside out round it. And the amoeba's death is more won- derful than its life ; for it dies by parting in twain, so that it is not really death which overtakes it, but rather birth. The English name for this little pioneer of Self is the Changeling. Whence did the Changeling come ? Darwin has taught us to look back along the growth of life-shapes, and see everywhere the branching of life. The beast life does not grow out of the plant life, both branch off from the Changeling. From what did the Change- ling branch off ? Everywhere as we look round us we see life cloth- ing itself with what we try to think of as dead Matter, but nowhere do we see the dead Matter filling itself The Elf 213 with life. We see the skin wrought around the life- strength, we see the bark and rind, we see the coral and the ivory, the wool without and the bones within ; but nowhere do we see life-strength wrought by what we call the elements. Everywhere the cell makes the shell, and nowhere does the shell make the cell. Is not the cell older than the shell ; and what we call Life older than what we call Matter ? which is indeed the Shell of Life. Whence came the Cell ? It may be older than we guess. It may not be made up of mud and water after all, any more than gold is made up of the clay and quartz amongst which it lies. It may be of kin with the flame in the bowels of the earth, and with the light on which it feeds, and by which it grows. It may have parted from the sun when the earth parted, and have yet its flaming kindred in the burn- ing orb. The Changeling may have been once a true salamander, that has fallen from its first estate, and forfeited its fiery shape. Ill The story of the elf has no beginning ? Has it an end ? Here is one parting of the ways between Materialism and Idealism. The Past is the department of the 214 The New Word first, the Future the department of the second. One is looking backward, and the other looking forward. In the fullest sense of the words, the Materialist is a historian, and the Idealist a prophet. Accordingly one of the tasks which idealists have naturally set themselves has been to make sure that the Life Within them would not die. They have done this because they hoped to live for ever. It is noteworthy that the greatest mind that has ever worked on behalf of men, the mind of the Buddha, was bent upon the contrary task of making sure that the Life Within could pass away into the Life Without. The language of the Buddha is the language of his age and country, which is to say that it sounds false to us. But in that language he has reached the greatest heights ever reached by one man's reason. He has reached to the nature of life, the falsehood of matter, the balance of action and reaction. His gospel is the gospel of those who believe in immor- tality, and dread it. To them he has shown the Way Out of Eternal Life. He has expounded the great law of metastrophe in terms of good and evil, or of pleasure and pain, pain the reaction of pleasure, and pleasure the reaction of pain. He has taught that these twins are the Atom of life, and that one cannot be destroyed without the other, nor without destroying life itself. He has put before men the choice between Life and Nothing, and invited them to choose Nothing. I think that no two men have ever had wholly the same religion, and I am sure that no two men ought The Elf 215 to. For such as think they want to leave off living, no better gospel than Buddhism is ever likely to be preached. But it is not Idealism. It is Nihilism. The verihood or falsehood of this gospel is beside the question. For if Idealism be the science of Life, learning by emotion, that cannot be Idealism which preaches the passing away of emotion, and the passing away from Life. Idealism, as I have said, has set itself instinctively to make sure of Life. Those idealists who have failed in their task, have failed because they were trying to learn from words instead of from the emo- tions expressed by the words. They hoped to live, but did not see that that hope was their best assur- ance. If the emotion we call hope be true, and sense be true, the tales of Hope and Sense will agree, as they do in the story of the elf. You hope to live for ever, you see that you have lived from ever ; what other assurance do you need ? Has not this been better said already by the Swedish poet ? " Every soul that longs aud glows Toward things that true and noble be, Bears within its depth, and knows, Assurance of eternity." That is what rightly ought to be called Idealism ; and if we are forbidden to call it Science, let us call it Imagination ; not talking positively when it talks about deep things ; not tapping on the walls of the All-Thing with a hammer, and pronouncing them hollow ; but listening at the chinks, with finger on lip, for the murmur of the Beyond. Imagination is 2i6 The New Word the ragamuffin called in by Science to sweep up its breakages. Imagination is the boy upon the steps, who thought that he had found the seed-pearl dropped by the archbishops. The boy is always there, in every age, outside the temple. He does not go into temples, whether in Rome or hi Jerusalem. He stays out on the steps, in the sunshine, looking for pearls amongst the dust. Perhaps he does not really find them. Perhaps it is the sunshine that he sees. He is reverent towards the archbishops while they are listening to God. When they talk back, he does not always join in the responses. He thinks his own thoughts, and he utters them in his own words. That is why, when the archbishops of to-day, muttering their Mediterranean incantations, come to the heart of their mystery, and recite, Energy of Motion, the boy whispers back, The Elf Inside. IV And now if we should widen this definition of life so as to take in, not only oneself, but other selves, and write it as the story of a Thousand Elves and One Elf ; if we should speak of these little lives as saying nay to the Yea of that Great Life, within which they move and have their being ; in that case our language about the All-Thing will echo the lan- guage of Materialism about the Atom, and the Least The Elf 217 that we have knowledge of will be a likeness of the Most. Yet it will not be the whole truth about Everything, any more than Thomson's pretty Chinese toy is the whole truth about Nothing. The good men whom I am fighting have some- times busied themselves with what they call the prob- lem of the origin of Evil. For me there is no such problem, because there is no such Evil as theirs. Evil for me means what I dislike, and it means nothing more. My only problem is how to overcome evil without greater evil, and I find that to be problem enough. In the meantime I am sure that unless I disliked some things I could not like other things, and I could not be alive. If you take away resist- ance, you take away existence. I agree with the Buddha in his reasoning, albeit not in his hope. Yet if I were to answer these good men in their own language which in me would be blasphemous language ; if I were tempted into speaking of the Man Outside in terms of the Man Inside ; I might say to them that the Great Life could not gain an outline except in battle ; that the Man Outside could not know himself except by turning one half of his strength against the other half ; that what I name Life and they name the Universe is One Strength turning into two, by turning inside out, and so, that the Twin Wrestlers of the whirl-swirl are both God. I think it never wise to hold such language as if it were aught other than a parable. Nor do I deem it the best parable. I am not sure of other lives than mine. I am sure of two strengths, my own strength and the Strength inclosing mine ; and from 2i8 The New Word my point of view these other lives about me, with the lives of the good men whom I am fighting, are part of that Outer Strength. So that I am myself the other wrestler, called upon to strive with the Great Wrestler, and up to a certain measure able to prevail ; as we may see a tiny eddy on the edge of a vast whirl- pool, going the other way. He who has watched the iron crumbs drawn into patterns by the magnet ; or who in the frostwork on the window pane has apprehended the unknown beauty of the crystal's law, seems to me to have an idea more wholesome to our frail imaginings of the meaning of the Mystery of Life. To me that seems the better parable. If we discern discord where we ought to discern harmony, let us believe the fault is in our ears and not in the Musician ; in our imperfect execution of our own parts, and not in the mind of the Composer. Not for that must we withhold our voices. Though they sound harsh in one ear, they shall sound sweet in another. Not for that must we lie down to sleep with the comfortable assurance that whatever is, is right. There is no is. There is no present tense in the metastrophe of time. The Present is the point at which the Future turns into the Past. Whatever is has been right, and will be wrong. Let us learn more and more to understand the harmony, and fit our execution to it, but in the mean- while let us wait on the Conductor. It is not for one string of the harpsichord to refuse to tremble when it is struck, lest it should mar the music of the others. It is not for the least fifer in the crowded The Elf 219 orchestra to hold his breath when the Conductor beckons to him, nor to quarrel with his blotted score because it bids him sound too high or low a note. All that is the Composer's business, and he conducts his Opera. The Score was written, he took the Baton into his hand, or ever the foundations of the earth were laid, and all the morning stars sang to- gether. Are we not better off already than the insect that toils a hundred fathoms deep beneath the wave to build the isle that it shall never see. We at least catch a prophetic glimpse of sunlight, and overhear the rustling of the palms. SIXTEENTH HEAD THE PAINTED WINDOW Talk about God. i. Applied Theology. 2. Legal Definition of God. 3. The Birth of Mind. 4. The Story of God. 5. Bad Language about God. 6. The Idol. T DEALISTIC science measures from the Strength jL Within towards the Strength Without. But it is still measuring relations. Like Materialistic science, it can only measure strength by measuring the ways of strength. The attempt to measure the Inner Strength by itself \is that science so unwittingly christened by Andronikos of Rhodes, which is not science but only talk. The attempt to measure the Over Strength by itself is fittingly named Talk about God, the Mediterranean word is Theology. It is significant that the best talker about men who ever lived, never talked about God. Of K'ung the Master, whom the Babus name Confucius, it is recorded that one of the subjects which he never would discuss with his followers was the appoint- The Painted Window 221 ments of Heaven. Once, when he was asked con- cerning our duty towards the spirits, he refused to answer, saying, " Let us first learn our duty towards men ; then it will be time enough to talk about our duty towards the spirits." Only on one occasion we are told, when he was in danger in K'wang, he told his followers, " If Heaven has lodged the cause of Truth in my person, what can the people of K'wang do to me ? " The best talkers about God who have ever lived were the Hindus. And after talking for a long time, and using very many words, they reached this con- clusion, that the only word which safely could be used about God was No : No. That was the end of their talk about God ; so that they left off where K'ung the Master had begun. The worst talkers about God who have ever lived, because the most positive and circumstantial talkers, were the Catholics. Their ablest talker, one of the ablest talkers I have heard of, was a Mediterranean man named Thomas Aquinas, who wrote a book called the Sum of Theology, or the Height of Talk about God. His book stands out as the highwater-mark of 222 The New Word the human mind in the Dark Ages. It is theology at its best, or worst. Aquinas was by no means a man of weak or narrow mind. Within the revolving cage of Andronican words there has toiled no braver nor truer-minded squirrel. That High Talk of his sounded so like verihood that to many of those who listened to it Aquinas seemed to be an atheist, while to others he seemed to be a saint. With truer instinct than Kant, and therefore with better reason, he wished to set out from the two words God and the Soul. But for Aquinas these words were fixed words, fixed by the authority, or as the Babu hath it, the ipse dixit, of the Catholic Church ; and thus his eyes were shut to the metastrophe between them. So this great sleep-walker never did set out, he only walked in his sleep, but never really left his starting-point. Such questions as came before his mind he examined truth- fully, setting out the arguments on both sides, but always giving judgment in the words of the Church. So we may see the mesmerised subject exercising his reason freely where it has been left free ; but as soon as he is brought up by the suggestion of the mes- merist, his mind ceases to work, and he repeats the mesmerist's will. The Churchmen had no doubt that Aquinas was a saint. They applied a simple test, and found that, however impartial might be the summing up, the verdict was always in their favour. To-day this book, the greatest book of Catholic Theology, ranks as a curiosity rather than as litera- ture. And that is not because, like the book of The Painted Window 223 Copernicus, it has done its work, but because no one any longer hopes that it can do any work. It has no going strength. It is like a disused incanta- tion, which the spirit has left off obeying. The spell is still there, but the spirit has fled. The failure of such a theologian is the failure of theology. If his Talk about God be not worth read- ing, no such Talk about God is likely to be worth reading. For my part, whenever I have tried to read any of this Talk, I have been brought up by sayings like these : " God is almighty ; God created the world ; God is wholly good ; the world is mostly evil." And that kind of talk has not helped me to know anything about God. The words have seemed to me to unsay each other. They have gone round and round me, but they have not taken me an inch nearer to God. Let us see how this Talk about God works out in practice. Here is a specimen of Applied Theology. Antonio Perez, the disgraced minister of Philip II, was seized by the Holy Inquisition, on a charge of heresy, for having threatened to cut off God's nose. The holy inquisitors did not proceed against Perez for the threat, but for the anthropomorphism. The heresy lay in saying that God has a nose, not in railing against God. In the view of the Holy Office it was worse to think falsely about God than to be angry with God. But now, let us look into this. Antonio Perez would not have railed against God unless he had thought God was going to treat him badly. So that in uttering his threat he was denying the goodness of God. Again, in threatening to injure 224 The New Word God, he was denying God's omnipotence. Therefore in the view of the inquisitors it was worse to think falsely about God's shape than about God's character. To use their own language, they were exalting the species above the essence. The curious thing is that all this while their own Book told them that God made man in his own image. However, as we know from history, the inquisitors were thinking really, not about God, but about Philip II, who was using them as the ministers of his revenge on Perez. The talk about God was only a blind ; perhaps that also was a kind of heresy. It does not look as though Andronican language about God were ever likely to be of material benefit to mankind. II By way of contrast, let us look at another kind of talk about God, a bit of rule-of-thumb theology. It happens that there is to be found in English law- books a working definition of God, that is to say, a definition good enough to dispose of a sum of money. It was made in this way. The merchants and the shipowners have a form of agreement which they call a charter-party. In this agreement they say that the shipowner is to The Painted Window 225 carry the cargo safely, but that he is not to be liable for losses brought about by, among other causes, " the act of God." It was not the lawyers who first wrote those curious, medieval words ; it was the shipowners and merchants. But of course they very soon quarrelled over their meaning, and so they came to the lawyers, and said, "Tell us what 'we mean by our words." It is noteworthy that they did not go to the theo- logians. They did not turn to the pages of that famous Sum of Theology, to ascertain the meaning of the words " Act of God." The theologians had been talking about God, and trying to explain God, for hundreds and hundreds of years ; and yet when these plain, business men wanted an answer to their question, it never struck them that the theologians could be of the least use to them. You see the reason. There was a sum of money at stake ; and so they wanted a real answer, an answer that would settle who was to pay for the lost cargo ; they did not want Mediterranean words that went round and round. So they went to the lawyers. And the answer of the lawyers was a very practical one. They said that God sent the big storms, but not the little ones. To the logical and theological mind that answer will sound very foolish. But let us look into it. The lawyers were not thinking about God, really, any more than the inquisitors ; they were thinking about who was to pay the sum of money. They had to find the strength underlying the words, and they 226 The New Word were wise enough to look for it in the minds of the shipowners and merchants. As soon as they did that they saw that what the words meant was nothing more than that the shipowner must do his utmost to carry the cargo safely. If it was lost in some little storm, when the shipowner's care might have saved it, then he was to pay, because he had not done his utmost ; if it was lost in some great storm, after the shipowner had done his utmost, then he was not to pay. It came to this, that there were two strengths, as it were, working against one another, the strength of the shipowner and the Strength Out- side ; and there was a measure up to which the strength of the shipowner could prevail. The bal- ance of the Strength Outside over the shipowner's strength was God. What can the Sum of Theology add to that ? What can be added to that by all who have ever reasoned " In endless mazes lost, Of providence, fore-knowledge, will and fate ? " the task which Milton, the poet in him triumphing over the theologian, has given to the damned spirits in Hell. What can be added to it by all those poor, tired, stupid, angry folks who are always trying to apolo- gise for God, to vindicate the ways of God to man, to explain to us that God is not so bad as he seems ? Most of their trouble is self-made. They look around them, and deem what they see to be Evil, and then The Painted Window 227 they begin to find excuses for God. Yet all the time they are not agreed among themselves as to what is evil. One says that pain is an evil, another that pleasure is an evil ; one tells us that labour is the primal curse, another that idleness is a yet greater curse. One or another thinks that marriage, or that celibacy, or that money-making, or that losing money, or that drinking wine, or that eating meat, or know- ledge, or ignorance, or not going to church, or going to the wrong church, is evil ; and so they set to work to excuse God for allowing these things to be in his All-Thing. All of them are in their hearts blaming God for not being more like themselves. Each of them is doing much what the Aragonese inquisitors were doing, making God a stalking-horse. When they ought to say "I," they say "God." When they ought to say, " I hate this or that, and therefore I will punish my neighbours for doing it," they say, " God hates." The Talk about God ends, as we see, in theological hatred. $ Whenever in Jits history the Ithuriel spear of any truth-seeker has touched it, Theology has been revealed in its true shape. And it is a Fiery Shape indeed. 228 The New Word in In these latter days a branch of learning has sprung up amongst us, almost unawares, and is growing as fast as theology is decaying. It was at first called folk-lore ; but as soon as learned men noticed it, they felt that they could only know it by a learned name, and they christened it Anthropology, which is to say, Talk about Man. Now this science tells us the ways in which man has talked about God. It is the history of Theology that the learned men have somehow named Anthropology. In reading the painful gibberish which good men are not afraid to write about their God, we sometimes come on sayings of this kind : All savages have a belief in God ; therefore there is such a person as God. And over against them we come on other sayings of this kind : No savages have a belief in God ; therefore the book which tells us that there is such a person must have been written by God. We need not ask which of these sayings makes the greater nonsense, because of course we learn from folk-lore what we have already learned from word- lore, that no one has ever lived without being aware of the Outer-Strength, as well as of the Inner. There were no Bishop Berkeleys among the early men, whose thoughts we partly learn from their language. The Painted Window 229 No one who ever felt hot and cold by turns believed himself to be alone in Everything. From that we begin ; the history starts there. Everywhere, as far back as we can go, weTfind men in communication with the Strength Outside, measuring it by measuring themselves against it, listening to it, talking to it, talking about it, not only in words, but in songs and dances, in signs and sym- bols, in all the languages in which they talked with one another. And in their language we read the growth of their belief ; and see it is no other than the natural growth of mind, or wakefulness, or consciousness, or by whatever name it may be called. Because the story is a double story, the story of a double understanding. Man's knowledge of the Inner and the Outer strengths kept pace together. As we have seen, he could not learn of one without the other, because he had to measure one by the other. Mind is Matter. It is the meeting place of these two strengths. The seat of Mind is, verily speaking, in the skin ; the brain itself is a fold of skin stuff caught between the bone-stuff, by the turning inside out of the life-seed while it is yet in the womb. And so the story of the mind is the story of the slow awaken- ing of the Self, from what seems to our scant measures the whole sleep of the lower life, upward through the dream-like instinct of the beast, to the distincter sight and carefuller reckoning of man. It is the Life Within being awakened by the Life Without. 230 The New Word IV In books not much less painful to read than the good men's books, though written by much brighter men, we come on these strange thoughts : The savage's belief in God is drawn from his belief in ghosts ; and as there are no ghosts, so there is no God. And again : One savage had no pronoun save he, and therefore he called the sun He ; and there- fore another savage, who overheard the first one, believed the sun was a He. Now our forefathers were not out of their senses, nor out of their minds. Their senses were keener than ours, and their minds less keen. The mind was less keen because the senses were more keen ; the counting-house in the brain kept too many books ; it reckoned in sounds and scents and tastes, and other forgotten notations which we have dropped. Our mind works better because it tends to use only one notation, that of sight. But in dropping the other notations we have partly dropped the know- ledge they expressed. The early mind was more round than ours. What we have gained in clearness we have lost in verihood. The early language has been scrawled over by later generations, much as the child's language is The Painted Window 231 scrawled over by the schoolmasters, and the wild man's of to-day by the missionaries of to-day. Yet on the whole we can make sense of it ; and it comes to this, that our forefathers were doing what we are still doing, thinking of other strength in terms of their own strength, and figuring it as a Man Out- side. They did this more openly than we do it. They treated the Man Outside as one of themselves. When they wanted to bribe him they offered the bribe frankly ; and when they were angry with him, they punished him ; and though they were often afraid of him, they were often not afraid to fight him ; and if, like us, they sometimes tried to hoodwink him, they did not, like us, try to hoodwink themselves at the same time. Man did not begin by saying to himself that there was another man in the stones and trees and stars he coaxed or threatened, any more than the child who strikes his head against a table says to him- self that there is another child in the table. He cries out because he is hurt, and he beats the table because he is angry with it. Feeling comes before thought, and emotion before explanation. The early man, we see, could not find the Man Outside, till he had found the Man Inside. He was in his way a Darwinian ; he recognised the beasts as his kinsmen, and some of them as greater than himself. Thus for a long time he seems to have figured the unknown strength outside as beast strength. He talks to the Kangaroo in the moon, and to the Crocodile in the river, and to the Dragon in the sun. 232 The New Word To^this day the Elder Gods, who have fallen from Heaven, retain the mark of the Beast Outside in tail and pointed ears and cloven hoof. By slow degrees, as man went on measuring his own life against the life outside, both became more distinct to him. He raised himself, partly emerging from the beast, as in the old Assyrian sculptures we see the man's head emerging from the body of the bull. The Sphynx is his prophecy of evolution. The Assyrian bull is a yet loftier prophecy. For on its shoulders are wings, and in our later art the wings have lifted up the face, and carried it away from the brute's body, and the khardb has become the cherub. Dreaming and guessing, hoping and measuring, man climbed upward by such ladders to the know- ledge of everlasting Life. Doubtless the ghost guided him towards the great interpretation. Was it not, too, a magic letter in the mysterious handwriting of the Man Outside ? And so at length the words be- come clear and beautiful for us. The man finds himself in the marble. The woman sees herself in the well. There is a Man in the sun, and a Woman in the moon. All this was not a nightmare ; it was an awaken- ing. Superstition passes into science. The Woman in the moon sways the great tides of the sea, and the more secret tides in man's own blood, and brings the child to birth at the appointed time. The Man in the sun, most wonderful of all these Men, goes round the world a conqueror, driving the four Seasons in his yoke, and bringing seed time and harvest. The Painted Window 233 Had they no voices, these Men Outside ? They had voices ; there were idealists in those daysj inter- preting the ways of Heaven by the heart of man. Did not that Bright One in the sun say by his pro- phets in Egypt and Syria and Asia and Greece : " What, are ye anointing a man at Easter, and slay- ing him, and burying him in your cornfields, that his life may give life to the seed, and his flesh be your bread ! Ye know not what you do. It is I who give life to the seed, I who give you your daily bread. Cease your cruel rites, for I am a merciful God, de- lighting not in the death of a sinner." Real prophets, I doubt not, a real Herakles, whether by that name or any other, went round the Mediterranean coasts, preaching the Gospel of the Sun, and snatching the victim from the cross. That old Talk about the Gods, which is called mythology, is confused in many ways, partly because all language is confused, partly because it is a layer of many languages. When the talkers no longer used the beast as an idol, they used it as a symbol, in short a word ; when they no longer slew the real christ at Easter, they named the sun at Easter, Christ. Their language is tangled and twisted be- 234 The New Word yond our power wholly to unravel, because it was beyond their power ; because it began as a tangle, when man's mind was still a blur, and he saw men as trees walking, and trees as men standing still. How hard the old cloistered scholarship, to which the Nobels of a bygone age gave their endowments, has toiled to understand the word glaukopis, given to the goddess Athene. Did it mean blue-eyed, or gray-eyed, or by the aid of Sanskrit merely glare- eyed ? And all the time they had not only the word glaux staring them in the face, as the Athenian name for owl, but they had the owl itself cut at the foot of every statue of Athene, and stamped on every coin of Athens, to tell them that she was the owl-eyed goddess, the lightning that blinks like an owl. For what is characteristic of the owl's eyes is not that they glare, but that they suddenly leave off glaring, like lighthouses whose light is shut off. We may see the shutter of the lightning in that mask that over- hangs Athene's brow, and hear its click in the word glaukos. And the leafage of the olive, whose writhen trunk bears, as it were, the lightning's brand, does not glare, but glitters, the pale under face of the leaves alternating with the dark upper face, and so the olive is Athene's tree, and is called glaukos. Why need we carry owls to Oxford ? Much of this olden language is with us still. It is bad language, not because it was always bad, like theology, but because it is out of date, and we repeat it without understanding it, like the Latin- school boys, and their Oxford schoolmasters. There is another Mediterranean building, standing beside The Painted Window 235 the school, and proudly looking down on it, inside which grown men and women are saying what sounds to me like Hie haec hoc. They are saying it to the Man Outside, and hoping it will sound better in his ears than it does in their own. But words are two- edged tools, and while they are talking to the Man Outside in the words of savages, they are partly thinking of him as if he were a savage, and they are partly behaving like savages, when they come out into the open air. The old savages, we have seen, thought of the Man Outside as many men ; and their descendants sometimes talk as if they thought there were two Men, ruling over them by two contradictory rules, which they foolishly label Science and Religion. The Man Outside does indeed speak to us by two voices ; but if they seem to contradict each other, that shows that we are not listening carefully. Hope is not less the word of God than Sense, and one word has to be interpreted by the other. In these days men seem to be divided into two parties, each listen- ing carefully to one word, and shutting their ears against the other with Mediterranean cotton-wool. That is the sin of this age ; it is that way madness lies. If Idealism has any business on earth it is here. Nobel has left his Third Bequest for the cure of bodily suffering : he has offered his Fourth Bequest to whomsoever can minister to the mind diseased. 236 The New Word VI There is another, and a true, distinction, which will be always with us while we live, however we may strive to do away with it, between the Man Outside and the Idol which we ignorantly worship. Life, says one of those idealists who are expelled from Oxford, and exiled from England, and denied the alms of Royal Literary Funds, ' ' Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity." So does the stained-glass window of the church debar our vision of the sun ; so is the Winged Figure it reveals, and that whether we spell its name Idol or Ideal, a false likeness of the Man Outside. Until that is learnt, nothing is truly learnt about God. God is the right name of that Figure on the painted window, a Figure made by man's hands, however honourably and beautifully ; and whosoever con- founds it with That of which it is the symbol is the heretic of the True Church. It is not the business of the Idealist to break the painted window, but rather to make it. In so far as he is an artist as well as a scientist, window-making is his calling and his craft. The eye of man can The Painted Window 237 seldom bear to look into the burning core of Veri- hood, and cannot bear it long. Light tempered to his need is strained through yonder shining False- hood, dyed hi the paints of the blue sky and green earth and foaming sea, the yellow day, the violet night, the red of blood, the glory of all creation's golden wheels. The falsehood is always there, the Figure changes. It is the calling of the Idealist to cleanse and change it, and to make ever fairer and fairer Figures, better and better likenesses of the Man Outside. The word idealist does not mean idolater, but idol-maker, after all. The Idealist is called to make windows ; let them look to it who will not give him leave. Let them look to it who imprison him in their temples, so that he must needs begin his work by breaking theirs. Every Catholic Church is a jail for the Idealist, whether it be built in Rome, or in Mecca, or in Pekin, or in Benares. And it does not lie with them who are sending out into the four corners of the earth to break windows, some of them older and more nobly painted than their own, to cry out when their own come under the glazier's hands. They who live in glass houses ought not to throw stones. The bloodiest iconoclasts the world has ever seen ought not j to whine so miserably when their own Idol is being washed. The Window-Cleaner on his side, must heed neither whining nor stoning. The Idealist has a Master whom he serves, and that Master is the Man Outside. He must go whither he is sent, suffering no man to 238 The New Word hinder him, for he has a great privilege. He cannot be stayed, neither can he be turned back, neither can any man lay hold of him to his hurt, for he is the ambassador of a great King. If Heaven has lodged the cause of Truth in his person, what can the people of K'wang do to him ? SEVENTEENTH HEAD THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT The Fear of God. i. The Worship of Falsehood. 2. The Knowledge of Good and Evil. 3. Meaning of Religion. 4. The Gods afraid of Man. 5. Divinity and Diplomacy. WE have now got so far in this inquiry as to see that a work of an idealist tendency must be a work of a practical tendency, and in some way or other of a reforming tendency. As the Materialist, by more careful measuring and clearer reckoning corrects the mistakes of sense, so must the Idealist correct the mistakes of hope. Both work towards the same end, the benefit of mankind, and both have to overcome the same enemy, the stupidity of man- kind. According to the Buddha, all evil is owing to ignor- ance. But that is not so. In a great measure ignor- ance itself is owing to stupidity, which in its turn is a mixture of laziness and cowardice, of sloth that cannot learn, and fear that will not. It is against sloth that the Gods themselves fight in vain. We cannot raise the beast to be a man, nor change the black man into a white. The leo- pard and the Ethiop have both fallen behind in the 239 240 The New Word race, and we may hinder ourselves more than we help them, if we try to run in couples with them. There are signs of other runners halting ; those Medi- terranean men, who led the van so proudly in their day, have they not been caught up and passed by the Baltic folks ? And in spite of all the talk about Humanity the Ethiop does not want to run in couples with us. The African does not want to rule the European, but only to be ruled by him kindly. The poor do not want to rob the rich man ; they only want him to pay his poor rate honourably. Even the bomb thrown at a king by the poor mad anarchist is only his insane way of asking for a sane king. Fear is a foe of far other mettle. The story of religion is on the whole the story of the conquest of fear by hope. This is a foe worth fighting, for when the Man Outside wrestles with us under this form he means us to prevail. " The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wis- dom." But it is not the end. When Alexander asked Diogenes if he were not afraid of him, the Cynic answered, " Are you a good man ? if you are, why should I be afraid of you ? " If the Man Outside is a good Man, then he cannot want us to fear him. He can only want us to live so that we need not fear him. Fear is the enemy that the Idealist has to fight. And yet fear is the hardest word for him to under- stand. For Fear and Hope are in metastrophe. The Forbidden Fruit 241 The wise healer, called in to cure a disease, will seek first to understand it, before he prescribes a remedy. In the case before us we have not only a disease to overcome, but a refractory patient ; and the bad temper of the patient is a leading symptom of the disease. Why do men fear relief from fear ? Why do they hope against hope ? Why do they deem it wicked to write books of an idealist ten- dency ? The thoughtful man, as he walks here amidst man- kind, must often feel as if he had strayed into a mad- house, wherein he could not raise his voice above a whisper without drawing down on himself the frantic clamour of the inmates, or worse, their silent, mur- derous hate. For the fool never forgives. While the two parties named Gnostics and Idiots, the learned and the un- learned, were contending for the mastery of the Catholic Church, the wise were bidden to suffer the fools gladly. But fools never suffer the wise gladly. The triumph of the Idiots was sealed by the blood of the Gnostics ; and from that day to this, like the frenzied Pope who dipped his pen in the consecrated chalice that he might curse his enemy in the very blood of Christ, the Catholic Church has written in 242 The New Word the blood of truth-seekers the excommunication of Truth. Enmity to Verihood is older than that strange re- vival which I call Catholic, or Mediterranean, to mark it off from the older Christianity whose lan- guage it gruesomely recalls. Falsehood is found in every religion, but only in the Catholic Christianity is it the foundation of religion. The first word of Buddhism is Know. The first word of Christianity is Believe. And the merit lies not in believing what is true, but in believing what is false. The greater the falsehood, the greater the faith. As one of them- selves has written, " I believe because it is im- possible." The anti-scientific instinct, which Christianity has hallowed as the cardinal virtue, is therefore not the fear that science may be wrong, but that it may be right. Heaven is trying to hide its laws from man, and he advances to discover them at his peril. The truth of the discovery is no excuse for the discoverer. When the geologists found out that the earth was more than 5804 years old, many good men thought them mistaken, because the margin of the English Bible had fixed the date of creation at 4004 B.C. When the good men had it shown to them that this date rested on Archbishop Usher's authority, and not on God's, they held their peace, and let the geologists go on. But they did not thank the geologists. Their feeling was that the geologists had shown great rash- ness and presumption, and that they would have done much better to keep their discoveries to themselves. The view that Heaven means us to learn its ways ; The Forbidden Fruit 243 that its first commandment is Thou Shalt Learn ; and that such learners as Copernicus and Linne and Darwin have rendered more faithful service to Heaven than the whole roll of saints and puritans, would be rejected unanimously by the conscience of Christen- dom. It is in the interest of Heaven, it is in defence of their God, that the theologians have laid their ban on all the sciences in turn, on the lore of the stars, of the rocks, of the atoms, of the frame of man, of his mind, of the Hebrew language and literature, of Eastern history, and of the history of life. Such is the disease. It is this habit of mind which brings about the so-called conflict between Religion and Science, which well-meaning men, who had not thought over the meaning of the word Religion, and the word Science, have wanted to make up. The conflict is between the view that God is displeased by the search for verihood, and that he is pleased. Such a conflict ought never to be made up. To-day the struggles of the patient are getting feebler, but the disease is still there. Only the other day an Anglo-Roman priest, of course not a bishop, was brave enough to tell his congregation, " We must face the truth about our documents." Fancy a teacher of medicine saying to his class, " We must face the truth about our drugs." Fancy a lecturer on astronomy telling his hearers, " We must face the truth about the stars." The man who shrinks from facing the truth about his documents does so because he fears they are false documents. What should we think of the counsel who said to his client in open court, " We must face the truth about our 244 The New Word evidence." What would a tradesman think of the banknote tendered to him by a customer, with the remark, " I must face the truth about this note." Again, and within the last year or two, a paper was read at a gathering in England called the Church Congress, on the teaching of religion in our great public schools, the schools for rich men's sons. And the argument of the paper was on this wise ; When the boys to whom we have taught religion in the schools go on to the universities, and find out that educated men no longer believe what we have taught them, they turn round and despise us for having taught them falsely ; what then is the least truth that we must teach them in the schools, so as not to be despised by them after they have gone to the universities ? That was the question raised by the paper, and on that the discussion turned. It was not a question of how much truth they might teach the boys, but how little truth they must teach. No one in that Church Congress hinted that the whole truth should be taught. No one proposed that they should teach as much truth as they could. No one argued as though the truth about God were a good thing for boys to know, or other than an unnecessary, and a dangerous, and on the whole a hurtful thing. That the teaching of some truth was a regrettable necessity was the basis of the discussion. And why was it a necessity? In order to save the teachers from contempt. Truth was to be told, not for the benefit of the boys, but for the benefit of the teachers. They were in this dilemma ; to please God they must teach falsely, The Forbidden Fruit 245 and to please the boys they must teach truthfully. And so that great gathering of churchmen, that gathering of all that was best and most representa- tive of English Christianity in the dawn of the twentieth century, sat there and painfully debated how far they must betray their God to save themselves. In the end they adjourned the discussion, that they might pass a resolution in favour of teaching the whole falsehood in the schools for poor men's sons. If the sufferers from this disease were asked to diagnose it they would most likely answer that fuller knowledge tends to make men lose faith. Their reasoning seems to be somewhat after this fashion : " I believe that God made the earth, and made it flat ; if I now learn that it is not flat, I shall cease to believe that it was made by God." Through the last few centuries we seem to hear a succession of men crying out, after each fresh discovery of veri- hood, " The earth moves ; therefore there is no God ! " " The earth is millions of years old ; there- fore there is no God ! " " The Buddha was a great and good man ; therefore there is no God ! " " There are traces of more than one hand in the writing of the Pentateuch ; therefore there is no God ! " Such a frame of mind can hardly be called faith. The man who holds to his God by a single hair, ready to let go if it should turn out that there is something in wireless telegraphy, or that there are no whales in the Medi- terranean sea, is surely not far removed from an infidel. Such is the leading symptom of the disease. It is time to look for the bacillus. 246 The New Word ii " And the Gods commanded the Man, saying, ' Of every tree in the garden eating thou shalt eat ; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat ; for in the day that thou eatest thereof, dying thou shalt die.' " And the Serpent said unto the Woman, ' Surely ye shall not die. For the Gods know that hi the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as the Gods, knowing good and evil.' " And the eyes of them both were opened. " And the Gods said, ' Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he live for ever ' . . ." The tabu of truth stands menacing on the first page of the old Book of Truth. The book which was read for more than a thousand years, by more than a tenth part of mankind, as the book of the know- ledge of good and evil, opens with the curse laid on mankind for having stolen the knowledge of good and evil from God. The readers of this book were not likely to be troubled by the contradiction. It was by no means the only test of faith. However, to us who read it as The Forbidden Fruit 247 a curious folk-tale, it may serve as a help to under- stand why good men fear that God fears the truth about himself. On the face of it, the story is a relic of snake- worship, that ancient worship of knowledge under the form of a snake, which has left traces half over the world ; which is a living worship in some lands to-day. A reverent king removed the brazen serpent out of the house of Yahweh, but no one has been reverent enough to remove the serpent myth out of the book of Yahweh. In spite of apologetic editing we still can see that the Serpent is the hero of the story. The jealous Elohim try to keep this knowledge from the Man by threats ; the Serpent tells him that their threats are vain, and bids him learn. His assurance is fulfilled, and the threat of the Elohim falsified. Like Pro- metheus, like many a Prometheus, the Serpent suffers for his material benefit to the Man, but the gift once bestowed cannot be taken away. The Man, too, suffers, but he does not die. Instead, the Elohim are driven to provide against his gaining eternal life ; as in another myth they devise means to keep him out of Heaven, when he threatens to take their King- dom with his Tower. The feeling that inspires this parable is not alto- gether the Christian feeling that knowledge, as such, is an evil rather than a good. Still less is it that profane learning is frowned upon by Heaven. There is no hint in the text that the Elohim grudged to the Man the knowledge of the earth's shape, or of its age, or of his own shape and age, or of any other 248 The New Word kindred topic banned by Christian morality. Those attempts to widen the tabu must seek warrant else- where. The knowledge here forbidden is of one kind only ; it is the knowledge of good and evil. The embargo is not on Science, but on Religion. Such a tabu cannot be understood till we recall the meaning of the word religion. m The root meaning of religion, or religio, had already passed out of mind in the days of Cicero, who suggested that the word might come from re- legere, to read over, the recital of a liturgy. To Lactantius and Augustine it seemed to come rather from re-ligare, to fast-bind, and to mean the bond or covenant between God and man. Both guesses have truth in them, but neither goes far enough back. Religion, in Augustine's sense, is found in its most natural form to-day on the west coast of Africa. As soon as a child is born his parents drive a bargain for him, much like godfathers and godmothers else- where, with an unseen spirit. The child binds him- self by proxy to keep some tabu, such as not to eat when he is on the water, or to abstain from the flesh of some animal ; and in return the spirit binds The Forbidden Fruit 249 himself, as it should seem by the same proxies, to take care of the child, and to lead him safely all the days of his life. That is a covenant ; it is the famous Covenant of Sinai in the germ. But religion is much older than that. Wars are older than treaties, and the covenant is in the nature of a treaty. In the beginning man was at war with nature ; the Men Outside were for the most part enemies, and if any of them were friends, those could be safely disregarded. The first business, and the only pressing business, was to defend oneself from the lightning, the torrent and the tiger, and from those unseen tigers whose teeth were felt in the mysterious aches and pains of suffering man. Against these foes man furnished himself with many weapons, and among them in turn came the magic spell. I interrupt myself here to set right a mistake which runs through all the books on folk-lore I have seen, except the fundamental work of Massey. When the wild man pours out a pail of water on the ground to get rain from the clouds, that is not " sympathetic magic." The wild man is not an electrician. It is sign language. It is the oldest language, and therefore the one the clouds are most likely to understand. The Gods are always rather backward in learning languages ; even some very civilised Gods have not yet learned to read, and after you have written your book of prayers, you have to recite it aloud to them. Buddha, we know, can read, and hence the praying- wheel. It is sign language, and it is no more magical than all lan- guage is. 250 The New Word The use of the magic spell of course is not confined to the case of the unseen tigers. A party of hunters sent out by a king of my own creation, to catch a leopard for me, armed themselves with a spell, some bows and arrows, and a gun. The spell failed to work, the arrows partly failed, and the gun did the business. This was the triumph of science over religion, or rather of the new religion over the old. For the old religion is the spell. A black man showed me how the spell ought to have worked, by folding up his fingers, and closing his mouth. The spell ought to have bound the leopard's claws and jaws, and would have done so if the spell-maker had fasted properly the night before. In the same way the unseen leopards are bound by liturgies and incantations. Relegere and religare are both right. In winter the Russian pope, in whom the northern wizard is still plainly to be seen beneath his Byzan- tine robes, walks through the forest, chanting as he goes, to compel the Pagan spirits of flood and fell to fall behind him, while he leads them to their prison beneath the frozen lake. In summer the same pope walks through the cornfield, chanting other litanies to compel the Christian spirit to give a plenteous harvest ; and if the incantation fails to work, the peasants lay the fault on the enchanter, and maltreat him, sometimes to his death. In prayer books further west there is a Prayer for Rain ; but still the children keep their old prayer, " Rain, rain, go away, Come again another day." The Forbidden Fruit 251 All that is religion. It is the bond in which the familiar spirit is bound by the magician ; it is the magic formula which the unwilling djinn obeys in the Arabian tales. The liturgies, the rites, the dances, the sacred observances of all kinds by which the outside Powers, seen or unseen, are compelled to obey man, are religious ; the oath by which man binds himself to them is also religious in its turn. The root-meaning of religion is not covenant, but bond. It is not a treaty, but a conquest, not an agreement, but a fetter. It was the knowledge of the fetters by which they could be bound, of the laws which they themselves obeyed, hi short the knowledge of religion, that the Elohim in the story grudged to the Man. If the Men Outside did not resent man's control they would not be human. When Prospero asks his servant sprite, " How now, moody, what wouldst thou ? " Ariel answers, " My liberty." It is their sleepless dread lest man should master them by his conjurations that leads them to withhold their names from him, like the Red Indian who goes through life under a pseudonym to baffle the malice of his enemies. 2 $2 The New Word An enchantment, it should seem, like a medieval writ, must call the defendant by his right name, or the whole process is null and void. So Moses does not dare to ask the Man in the burning bush for his true name, but only for some name by which to call him ; and the Man answers still more guardedly, " I am who I am." The Third of the celebrated Ten Command- ments witnesses to the same belief. As we have seen, it is not altogether a false belief. The Name has an unexplained power in the Mystery. Well did those old Hebrews hide the true name of their God, calling him Lord and King and Bright One. We, for our part, call him the Good One. We do so by way of compliment, as our peasants still speak of the spirits of flood and fell as the Good People. They hope by doing so to coax them to behave like good people. In the meantime we have not yet learned the true name of the Man Out- side. In most religions the ritual and the moral law, the spell and the tabu, are intermingled, though in most of them words count for more than deeds. Heresy is a greater sin than homicide in every well- regulated church. The view that Pure Religion is visiting the widow and the fatherless in their affliction is put forth in the epistle which Luther condemned as an epistle of straw. The tabus come under the influence of the old belief. The Church of Rome keeps a banking account with God. So many masses said, so many fasts and mortifications, so many orphans fed, so many Protestants burned, and so many years struck off the The Forbidden Fruit 253 purgatorial sentence. If the saint leaves a balance to his credit, God is debited with that balance in the general account of shiners. As soon as God's balance is on the wrong side a soul escapes from Purgatory, like a drop of water overflowing when the tank is full. These dynamic laws work even more thoroughly in earlier religions. In the Ramayana a wicked man who wishes to destroy the world sets himself to practise unheard of austerities in order that he may be able to compel the Gods to execute his purpose. The dismayed Gods hold a council. They cannot evade their obliga- tions. Enough fasts endured, enough gashes self-in- flicted, and they must destroy the world. And so, as the sole resource, one of them goes down to earth, and forcibly interrupts the pious exercises of this mechanical moralist. That is the sequel to the story of the tree of know- ledge. It was in their own defence that the Elohim forbade the knowledge of their own laws to the Man. They behaved just like the Philistines who forbade the Israelites the use of iron ; just like the Christian Powers who forbid the heathen the use of magazine rifles. Perhaps it is also in their own defence that other personages have shown a like jealousy of knowledge ever since. 254 The New Word v To-day, Theology, driven from every other corner of the field of knowledge, is sheltering itself in its last ditch under a shield borrowed from the enemy. The theologians are claiming to be specialists. They are saying to the Materialists, " Each of us has his own department : you leave us alone, and we will leave you alone." The Materialist may accept that apology. The Idealist cannot. For it is, alas ! in their own depart- ment that the theologians are at their worst. Their Hebrew scholarship is a hundred times worse than their Latin scholarship. Their maps of Heaven are far falser than their maps of earth. The grand fault of the theologians is, not that they have known nothing about man, but that they have known nothing about God. The sad thing is that all this divinity is at bottom only diplomacy. All this Talk about God ends in talk about the government of men. Every priest is still at heart a king, and every theologian a law- giver. Catholic Theology has not been building a house of cards all this time, with its Andronican words. It has been rebuilding the Capitol. The Man who hides in so much language is not Jesus of Nazareth, but Caesar. The crowning dogma, the top- The Forbidden Fruit 255 stone of the edifice, is this, that all the world shall kneel and kiss the toe of whomsoever rules in Rome ; and all Roman Catholic Theology, however honestly it may be written, is a means to that end. EIGHTEENTH HEAD THE PYRAMID Diagnosis. I. Worship of Death. 2. Madness. 3. Making and Breaking. 4. The Devil. 5. The Word of the Black Man. 6. The Puritan. ONE of those poets who receive honorary degrees from Oxford, and peerages from England, and pensions from Royal Funds, one of those idealists who are found foregathering with archbishops in Metaphysical Societies, gave the last generation this advice : " Leave thou thy sister when she prays Her early Heaven, her happy views." It is well-meant advice. It is kindly advice. It is the advice which the kind-hearted Idealist is always being tempted to take. The question is whether it is for the benefit of mankind that he should take it. If that kneeling sister were nothing but a Sister, if when she rose from her knees her life were to be spent in a cloister, or in the holier cloister of the homes of the widowed and the fatherless, ministering to them in their affliction, who is there so sure that he has 256 The Pyramid 257 heard the Man Outside aright, as to interrupt her with the message ? But if her very prayers and offices of kindness are offered as tribute to a Power that is the enemy of mankind ; or if, when she rises from her knees, it is to go through the world as wife and mother, teaching her children and her brothers' children to pray falsely in their turn, it may not be so well to leave her her early Hell, and her unhappy views. Is there no heresy in making the Mother more sacred than the Child ? It was not, persuaded by such advice, that those Idealists who first saw that Heaven of hers, and strenuously embraced the happy and unhappy views, went forth into all the world, and preached their gospel to every creature. Not hi obedience to such advice did he who had heard glad tidings of great joy and fearful tidings of damnation, leave his sister her false Olympus and her devilish mythology, while she prayed to Zeus or Isis. Not to such music beat the hearts of those who compassed sea and land, crossed deserts, braved angry mobs, confronted Roman judges, fought with wild beasts at Ephesus, and alas ! fought like wild beasts on the same spot thereafter. The advice is weU meant, but it comes two thousand years too late. It should have been offered to Saint Paul. The poet who gave that advice acted like a physician who should give the patient up. It is easy to see what was in his mind. If the bandages that have been used to stunt the growth of the Chinese girl's foot are removed in later life, the effort of the foot to regain its natural growth and shape causes her intense pain. 258 The New Word It was that pain which the last generation had to suffer when it read Darwin's book. And this explanation shows us the ultimate nature of the disease which the Idealist is called in to cure. I: The disease lies deeper than that old tabu of religion. It is older than the Catholic Church. It is at least as old as the Great Pyramid, which is also a Catholic Church. And the true name of the disease is not Fear, but Fixity. It is Materialism in its idealistic shape, because it is the fixture of Hope. The doctors, whose science is so honourable, but whose language is so wretched, know a disease, not easy to be cured, by the name of atrophy. This word is on the face of it the contradiction of meta- strophe. But the specialist is so exact, the teacher is so slow to learn, the microscope-minded man finds it so hard to put two and two together, that we must help him to understand the doctor's word. According to that sepulchre of sense, the lexicon, atrophy means wasting away for want of nourishment, and comes from the imaginary root tark, to fill up. But as soon as we make bold to spell the word atropy, The Pyramid 259 the lexicon betrays its secret, confessing that atropy means unchanging, or ceasing to turn. -Tropy (with- out the a), it says, is turning and -trophy (without the a) is hardening. But let us not stay bewildered there. This very hardening is the hardening of milk into butter in the churn. -Tropy is turning, and -trophy is churning ; the English words sound as well together as the Greek ; and the makers of words had an ear for Rhyme, if the historians of words have none. And what then is the real difference ? The dairy- maid will tell us that the whole art in churning is in turning the milk always the same way ; if you turn it this way and that it will not harden so quickly into butter. Thus the mystery of the universe is revealed in the dairymaid's churn. The word Universe means Churn. It is the whirl without the swirl. Atrophy, then, is softening instead of hardening. It is weakness rather than emptiness, the want of power to use food rather than the want of food, in short it is voluntary starvation. Perhaps the doctors of the body understand their word better than the doctors of speech. Atropy is hardening instead of softening. It is the kind of hardening that comes of ceasing to turn. The milk has become thick by stagnation. And that is the disease that we are dealing with. It is an apoplexy of the mind. It is the relaxation of paralysis. Pure fixture would be Death. And we have seen that there is no pure fixture. The turning movement, like the forward one, is changed into pressure. The 260 The New Word fixture of hope intensifies it, and the intensity is one side of the disease. We can now see the danger lurking in the word Ideal, which is so like the fixed Idea. Here the Idealist must begin to be wise, for this is his own disease. The hardness of his mind is not the blunt- ness of the rock, but the severity of the flame, which wavers in every breath of air, and yet can melt the diamond. Pure Fixture is an ideal. It is idealism in its materialistic shape. The Hope of Death is the death of hope. And it is the language of Death, and of the olden worship of Death, which we meet with in certain words familiar to most of us ; it is Death in whom there is no variableness, " neither shadow of turning." We have seen that there is no real death ; it is only an ideal, the ideal of those who are tired of living. Death is an Andronican word, and once meant deafness, if philology will pardon me the rhyme. That which we speak of as dying is a metastrophe too sharp for us to measure. I doubt if any man has ever thoroughly believed in Death. All men believe in dying, although they view it with widely different feelings. Those Yellow men, to whom we are sending out to teach the truth about Hell, will offer to die for a few shillings ; the woman who was for forty years Head of the Church of England offered a million of money to be let off dying for one moment. On the whole the language of death- worship seems to have strengthened the dread of dying. There have been no terrible death-beds in the world except those of Christians. The Pyramid 261 Well may those who worship Death worship in dead languages. As if there were ever a dead language, or a fixed language. As if any generation had ever used the same language as the past genera- tion ! As if one man had ever used the same language as any other man ! Away with these dead words about dead Gods ! Away with all dead books, be- ginning with dead lexicons, and ending with dead liturgies, for they are one and the same. I claim this Bequest for works of a living tendency. The Cell is more than the Shell. When one of these twain must perish, let us see to it that it be the Shell. II Faith, says the arch-antagonist of Jesus of Naza- reth, faith is the certainty of hope. It is the cer- tainty that in the long run kills the hope. Faith, fixture, Matter, death all these are names for the same fatal tendency. The materialistic belief in the resurrection of the body has ended in almost strang- ling the natural belief in the immortality of the soul. A defender of dead words about God, whose book was for long, and may be still, put into the hands 262 The New Word of students in our Anglo-Roman colleges, wishing to prove that there was such a person as God, likened man to a watch. It was a clever likeness from his point of view ; the watch was the nearest he could get to a seeming life that should be yet more dead " energy of motion." But it was a fatal likeness for him, because the strong untaught sense of one of those idol-breakers who wish to prove that men really are dead, turned it against him by asking, " When the watch stops, what becomes of the go ? " It is said that most of the students into whose hands this book is put turn atheists for a time, after reading it ; and it sounds likely. The Elf Inside rebels against what Poe wisely named rectangular obscenities. The watch is nearly at the bottom of the mischief, but not quite. We must look further than that unlucky apologist. The most widely read book written in the last century was a story called Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is a story written by a very good white woman who was certain that black folks ought to be just the same as white folks, and who was found willing to kill a hundred thousand men to realise her ideal. And in the story there is a very good white woman who is trying to make one little black girl like herself, and who thinks the way to do it is to teach the little girl to repeat Mediterranean words, words which the good woman herself of course did not understand. So she begins by saying to the little black, " Who made you ? " And does any one remember what the little black answers ? The Pyramid 263 " Spects I growed." How all Christendom laughed at that answer fifty years ago ! And about the same time Darwin was giving the same answer in more measured words. It was the full metastrophe. Instinct had turned into faith and returned into science. It does not do to mind the laughter of all Christendom. They laugh best who laugh last. That good woman, we can see, had got Materialism on the brain. She had got that ugly rectangle in her own mind, and she wanted to put it into the round mind of the little black. She was trying to tell that black child that she was something like a watch, whereas the child knew very well that she was some- thing like a flower. The question she really put to the child was, " Who killed you ? " And the child's answer really was, " I am living." That good white woman is not dead. She is still with us, and she is still spending vast sums of money every year in telling black children that they are rather dead than living, and scrawling over that precious manuscript of the Man Outside, the black mind, with the bad language of the Salvation Army. She is trying to tell the Hindus, who are the most devout people in the world, that ugly story, and as fast as she succeeds they turn into criminals. She is trying to tell it to the Chinese, and when they do not want to hear it she is as ready as ever to pass from ugly words to ugly deeds, and kill everybody who hinders her, as long as they are too far away for 264 The New Word her to hear the cries and smell the blood. Now why does that good woman that otherwise beautiful woman behave in that ugly way ? It is all part of the same question. The poison is in her word " made." It is no other than the word mad. We catch the sense in saying that her mind is made up. The man who has so far made up his mind about anything that it can no longer reckon freely about that thing, is mad where that thing is concerned ; and if he is alone in his madness, and his madness threatens us with mischief, we put him in a madhouse. Madness is the besetting sin of the Idealist. Let him take warning by this good madwoman. There is another word, creation, but we need not look into it. Whatever it may have meant for those who wrote it and the Hebrew word seems formerly to have meant shaped or measured out the good woman's words are Made, and Maker, and Almighty. Let us look into them. The Pyramid 265 ill When I was seeking in my Dutch word-book for some light on the word strength, I found two words for it, magt and kracht. Magt seems to be the English might, but we have lost kracht as a thing-word. The sense is the making and the cracking strength, or, as we now should rather say, making and breaking. These are the whirl and the swirl. I even found this further entry ziel kracht, with the meaning, " faculty of the soul." It is the Elf Inside breaking through his shell, as the bud cracks its green sheath to burst into a flower. What the English language has done is to exchange crack for break. The English for kracht, therefore ought to be bright. English philology, it is true, refers bright to beorht, meaning to shine. I do not know if I am bound to go on quarrelling with Doctor Latham ; he was a learned man ; no doubt he had read his old English texts faithfully ; but his fault is that he was an exact philologist, that is to say, he was a mad philologist. However, I think I have read in the Song of Brunanburh, ' ' Glad over grundas God's candle beorht." 266 The New Word God's candle, like other candles, burnt, and no doubt burnt brightly. Indeed, philology admits that the word beorht is of kin with flame. Burning is a kind of breaking ; as I have said, a flame leaves a worse bruise than an iron hammer. And heat is of kin with light. But it is when the day breaks that the shadows flee away. A later and better authority tracks bright back to an imaginary Aryan root bhrag, meaning to blaze, and tracks break to another imaginary Aryan root bhrag, meaning to break ; and so perhaps some future and still better authority may detect a certain like- ness of sound and spelling between these two im- aginary roots, as I have detected a likeness of sense. It is a pleasure to add that even philology allows a common origin to make and might. I deem it not irrelevant to this inquiry, it is per- haps the soul of this inquiry, to demonstrate time after time, how true, how strong, how bright as well as mighty, are these heirlooms of ours, these daily words which have so long been snubbed and overlooked by men whose eyes were dazzled by that Alexandrian candle. They have come down to us burning with the long thoughts of a thousand Baltic generations. They say to us, and for us, more than we see them saying. They go deeper than reckoning. They stir that in us which music stirs, and the light of sunrise and sunset stirs, and the scent of northern violets, and the touch of a dear and long lost hand. They are a glorious kind of covenant. We helped to make them, with the Man Outside also helping. They are his revelation, The Pyramid 267 and our prayers. Cinderella has sat in the ashes long enough, while her ugly step-sisters flaunted it in the king's halls. Let her come forth. Dress her in silk and gems, and set a crown upon her head. She is the true bride of the Prince. When we look deep enough we find only two sounds beneath all spoken words, one made by in-breathing, and the other by breathing-out. That is the whirl- swirl in language. And when you make those sounds you find that one is depression, and the other is ex- pression. They are the sounds of sorrow and of joy. These are the two sounds that underlie Might and Bright. The word Almighty doubles the stress on Maker. And it is that stress which we press upon the child's brain, fresh from its mother's womb, having coiled up within it as within a seed the memories of sem- piternity. To whom we say that Life is Death. It is not so. We are not made, we are makers. We help to make Life ; the Man Outside calls us to help him, calls to us in a thousand voices to partake the glorious toil of creation, to strike blow for blow upon the anvil, and forge the crown we are to wear. 268 The New Word IV The words are no sooner said than they have to be unsaid by another word which, in mythology if not in philology, once meant the Bright One ; and so we have the Devil at work breaking what the Almighty makes. It is significant that many good men are now crossing the word Devil out of their Bibles, because they find it too ugly. But it was not always ugly. That Devil was not always so black as he has been painted by the theologians. As they themselves con- fess, he was formerly in Heaven. There was a time when he was the Light-Bringer, and Lord of the Ascendant. This Man Outside is not altogether a child of the Mediterranean. Do not the Scandinavians still say when lightning strikes the trees, " Loki is beating his children." How shall we deal with that learned professor in Christiania, who has told us seriously that this old God of the North drew his name and nature from the writings of certain half-Christian Anglo-Irish bards in the tenth century, and that Loki is a shortening of Lucifer ? He has looked through the wrong end of the telescope. Folk sayings The Pyramid 269 of that kind are older than any writings in the world. The Roman lucus, as an ancient jest reminds us, was a wood, and as the ancient men drew light from logs liLcendus a luco the wood is the fire-spirit's natural dwelling-place. Loki is the fire-spirit, and so Lucifer may have been, in his first avatar, long before ever he ascended into Heaven as the morning-star, and then again descended into Hell, resuming, as it were, his fiery shape. I do not know if the peasants, or if the Anglo-Irish bards, have mixed up these two avatars, but I am sure the professor has. We see that, after all, words cannot be fixed alto- gether, nor idols altogether broken. The Gods play a strange game of Puss-in-the-Corner with each other ; the hopes of one age pass into the fears of the next, and back again into the hopes ; the world turns round, and as it turns the old constellations go down into the deep, and other, older Shining Ones rise up. Not to know this, to be afraid of this, is Atropy. The suffering of the past perhaps I ought to write the present generation is like the pain with which the snake sloughs its old skin, ere it puts on a new one better fitted to its needs. It is like that with which our little fellow-creature the lobster breaks out of the old shell it has outgrown, while yet the new one has not hardened round it. Such is the disease. The best remedy for disease is prevention. And that is why I am writing against what is falsely called Science as well as against what is falsely called Religion. I am thinking of the new shell as well as of the old. I am looking a thousand years ahead, and 270 The New Word watching other generations breaking asunder other swaddling bands. I want those bands to be less hard to break. Hardmindedness is the particular shape of Materialism that I dislike most, and deem to be the greatest foe to happiness. If we were less hardminded towards the Man Outside, and less so towards our- selves, it would follow that we should be less so to- wards our fellow men. Unwillingness to learn is deafness towards the Man Outside. And the Deaf are no other than the Dead. The explorers of the old Egyptian tombs tell us that they can see this shadow falling across the valley of the Nile, thousands of years ago, though whence it fell is still obscure to them. They can see the dark mist of Death-Worship blotting out the old happy pictures of a life beyond the grave not unlike this life, and replacing them by monstrous visions of purgatory and judgment. And so I find the focus of this long metastrophe of knowledge in the Egyptian Pyramid, itself a giant Tomb. It is the mightiest building upon earth. It is the The Pyramid 271 greatest monument of the most long-lasting Medi- terranean Power. Hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed in building it ; its founder went to sleep in it, wrapped in the curse of mankind, believing that he had secured himself an everlasting death. And to-day it stands empty ; there is no corpse of any slave huddled into the sand, till the hyena comes to scratch it up, that is not more secure than that proud Pharaoh. It is an astronomer's building, an eternal kalendar. And since it was built, the very pole of heaven has shifted, and the kalendar has been thrice reformed. It is a sermon in stone, an architectural bible. And it has witnessed the rise and fall of three religions, not one of which has known what it owed to the Masons of the Pyramid. This Delta raised in three dimensions is the em- bodiment of Pure Measure ; the idol of Fixity ; the shell of Logic and Theology. This frozen flame is the perfect Denial of Change. It is the Last Word of the Black Man. Europe has got this Pyramid upon the brain. Here is the ogre's fortress, and not in any mushroom city on the Seven Hills ; and here a foe worthy of the White Knight's steel. If those poor mad Idealists who call themselves Anarchists could see this, as I see it, they would leave off throwing their bombs at better Idealists than they are. They would bring their bombs here, and find a safer cockshy. They will break their teeth before they do much damage to old Khufu. A little child of six once brought me a toy that had 272 The New Word been screwed fast, and asked me to untighten it. There was a new word not to be found in any of the word- books ; the child made it for himself ; but his authority is good enough for me. I am not an exact philologist. It happens to be the very word I am in need of now. For I also am an anarchist, and my bomb is one small seed ; and seeds have this strange power that in the long-run they can unlock the mightiest masonry. Give me leave to sow my seed right under the base of Khufu's Pyramid, and have patience. We shall untighten it. Why are my poor mad friends in such a hurry ? Have we not half eternity before us ? VI The Pyramid, according to philology, has no imaginary Aryan root, nor any known Egyptian one. But this time psychology is on the side of the imaginary Aryans. For when the Greeks gave the word the spelling which we still use, they were thinking of their own pyre, or funeral fire, and dimly or clearly re- cognising in the pyramid a granite flame. In this way it comes about that he who has this pyramid upon the brain is rightly called a Puritan. For there The Pyramid 273 are more Rhymes in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by etymology. Now, as I have said, the pyramid is the Black man's word, and it does no harm to the Black man. When the black Puritan takes a vow of celibacy, and tortures and starves himself to death in the lethal chamber of the monastery, he is acting for tha benefit of mankind, and doing just what science ought to wish him to do. I hold it unscientific, and I am sure it is inhuman, to drag him out of his own self-chosen lethal chamber, and put him into some other one devised by us ; and it is the very crime of crimes to order him to go out into the world and beget children, for us to torture and imprison and lethalise in their turn. The Black man has learnt this lesson long ago, and so he can worship the fakir without becoming one. But the White man's natural symbol is the living flame, and not the granite one. He is a raw appren- tice in fakir- worship, and a blunderer. And so the White fakir wants to make every one else a fakir against their will ; and he takes a vow of marriage, that he may beget children and train them up as fakirs. That is his mistake, and that is the mistake to be set right. The White fakir is less thorough-going than the Black fakir, but he is a lesser nuisance to himself in order that he may be a greater nuisance to his neighbours. And so we find that what the White man has gained in freedom of thought he has lost in freedom of action. The Puritan thinks what he 274 The New Word likes, and the Catholic does what he likes, like the Prussians and Frederick the Great. The Black mind seems to be past curing. They that are sick unto death need not a physician. It is a case for the altruistic principle once more. I want to untighten the Puritan brain, because I think it is the brain of a good man. NINETEENTH HEAD THE ECLIPSE The New Religion. i. White and Black. 2. Afri- can Tales. 3. The End of the World. 4. Prophecy. 5. The Heretic. EVIDENTLY it is not the business of Idealism to furnish mankind with a new religion. The new religion is already with us. It has been with us for some hundreds of years. It is no longer struggling for a footing. It is partly established by law. It has always had its heretics, and it has for some time been persecuting them. Men are being sent to jail in England, while I write, for fidelity towards Christianity, and infidelity towards Science. The old religion bade men, when their friends were ill, to pray to the Man Outside in words. The new religion bids them to pray in drugs. And when they obey the old religion, and disobey the new, and their friends happen to die, the law sends them to prison. The new religion has won its way over the old by sheer business merit. Its spells are stronger than those of the old religion. They work better. They bind the Man Outside more surely. The prayers 275 276 The New Word of the new religion are more often answered. The priests of the old religion themselves have learnt that. When they want to bind the Man Outside not to strike their church with lightning, they no longer trust to the prayers written in their book. They borrow the iron prayer of Science ; and that prayer climbs above the church ; and, like a trail of ivy, sucks the strength out of the church. The new spells are stronger than the old spells because they are braver. They do not treat the Man Outside as though he were a half-savage tyrant, ruling by fits and starts, and swayed this way and that by the flatteries of his courtiers. They treat him as a Man who, on the whole, knows his own mind, and means us to know it, and gives his prizes for discernment and not for flattery. And so the new prayer does not cast itself on its knees saying, " Thy will be done : " it lifts its iron finger to the skies with the proud challenge, " Touch me if you can ! " The new prayers are more businesslike than the old, because they are written to please the Man Outside and not the Man Inside. And they use the language which the Man Outside seems to understand best, the language of deeds, not words. They are sincere prayers. They ask for what men really want, and not for what they pretend to want, or fear the Man Outside wants them to want. Hence they are not so often put up out of vanity, and so as to be heard of men, as the old prayers. Above all they are truthful prayers. They are not attempts to hoodwink the Man Outside. The plumber The Eclipse 277 does not lay down a dummy drain, and hope the Man Outside will mistake it for a real drain. He may break the sanitary laws, but he does not think he can break the Law of Health. And the new prayers have all these merits because they try, on the whole, to be true prayers. Verihood is the foundation of the new religion. The Man Outside is revealing himself to us by a new name, and Verihood is that name. Between these two religions how does the Idealist stand ? It is significant that the new religion comes from the North. It breathes the sheer courage and intense love of life of those old Vikings who prayed to die in battle, and not a cow's death on the straw. It is on the whole the rebellion of the Baltic against the Mediterranean mind. For that reason the Idealist will not want it to end in the harsh conquest of the Mediterranean by the Baltic mind. We have heard too much of world religions. The world can do very well without another Catholic Church. The Northern folk are the White folk. What we are dealing with is the White Man's religion. 278 The New Word By one of those Rhymes which the seeing eye sees everywhere, and which only stupefy the stupid eye, the Papal party in the new Rome call themselves the Blacks. Anyone who has ever lived among the real Blacks, in the land of the Black River, can under- stand why. Europe, as I have said, is an African colony conquered from Asia. And Christendom has been its reconquest by Africa, a great spiritual jacquerie not yet over, so that more than one White king is still cowering at Canossa, doing homage to that Black Caesar from the Catacombs. As I have said, the task of the Idealist is not only to free White men from the Black religion, but to save Black men from the White religion. I myself spend so much time in the thirtieth century that the latter task sometimes seems to me the most pressing. But perhaps the two tasks are really one and the same. II Nothing is more painful and bewildering to the White mind than what seems to it the reckless lying, the utter indifference to verihood, of the Black mind. That literature of the Black Age, those legends and romances, have not their very names become our The Eclipse 279 words for falsehood ; by a Roman tale, do we not mean a tale that is not supposed to be true ? It is not till we come to the Icelandic sagas that we seem to find men making any effort at all to tell the story as it really might have happened. And yet all the time the fault has been partly our own. There has been a misunderstanding. We have partly mistaken poetry for prose. All these- old Mediterranean men did not always mean to deceive. The man who wrote, without one doubt or hesitation, " They called his name Jesus that the prophecy might be fulfilled : They shall call his name Immanuel " that man does not seem to have been trying to deceive anybody. He tells us fairly enough what the prophecy said, and what the event said. He thought the two tallied, and so have we thought down to the present day. He wrote in his sleep, and we have read in our sleep. Now, if a modern reporter, describing a christening, were to say the child was named John to carry out the request of his godfather that he should be named Alfred, we should see the discrepancy. Those old writers and readers saw no discrepancy. And so they put forward as part of their apology a statement that the modern apologist has to apologise for. Surely it is using bad language to say that the old apologists were trying to deceive us. As one of themselves has put it, they deceived themselves, and the truth was not in them. The grand mistake of the White mind has been to take the Black mind literally, or rather to mistake Letters for Things. The old painters who painted 280 The New Word their heroes with yellow plates around their heads did not mean to tell us that they really went about wearing yellow plates, as a Frenchman wears his red ribbon, but only that they were very good men that they deserved to wear yellow plates. The White mind has been believing that the yellow plates were really there. Now it has been much the same with the Roman tales. I have before me a Roman tale, a fair specimen of the Black book. It is called the " Life of Saint Francis Borgia, S. J.", a very good man, related to a Pope of Rome who was not a very good man. It is published in the Anglo-Irish town of Dublin, and it bears the following strange inscriptions : " Nihil obstat. Edwardus Kelly, S. J., Cens. Dep." and " Imprimatur. Gulielmus, Archiepiscopus Dublinensis, Hiberniae Primas." We see at once that it is a thoroughly Mediterranean book, about fifteen hundred years behind the times. It tells the story of a General of the Jesuit Society, who had the good fortune to be canonised (whatever that may be) in the year 1671, and it goes on to say, " In connection with this occasion there is an in- cident on record which shows how deeply God resents an affront against the honour of his faithful servants. In a remote town of Spain a number of persons were discussing the recent canonisation, and remarking on the virtues and miracles of the saint, when an unhappy heretic, overhearing them, exclaimed, ' You make very sure that the famous Duke of Gandia is in heaven, in spite of his absurd superstitions and miracles ; rather than believe it I call on God to send me down to hell The Eclipse 281 this moment, body and soul.' Scarcely had the blasphemy passed his lips when the awe-stricken and terrified beholders saw the fulfilment of his impious wish, for the earth immediately opened beneath his feet, and, engulphing him in its depths, reclosed for ever over him." Now when the White Man reads tales like that they do him harm. But they do not harm Arch- bishop Gulielmus and Edwardus Kelly S. J. and their friends. They understand them. That is merely their Mediterranean way of saying that Francis Borgia was a very good man. It does not help us to think any better of this worthy Jesuit to be told that the earth opened in "a remote town " of Spain, and that a Baltic-minded man disappeared into the bowels of our planet ; but it helps them. They do not mean that if we should speak disrespectfully of Archbishop Gulielmus the pavement of Dublin or elsewhere would open beneath our feet, and engulph us. If we should offer 8,000, or 8,000 times 8,000,000 to Archbishop Gulielmus on condition that the earth should open in some town not too remote to have a name, and engulph an unhappy heretic, he would answer quite fairly that we had not understood his little book. In the same way, when I lived in Dublin, my Black friends used to assure me that this very Archbishop Gulielmus could, if he wished, strike every heretic in the city dead. I am not sure if this power of his is even limited to his own diocese, but in any case it is formidable enough. Now in telling me that, my friends were not trying to deceive me. It was an African tale, that was all, and I have heard tales like it 282 The New Word since, in Africa. My friends would have been quite as much surprised as I, if the archbishop really had struck any heretics dead. It was only their African way of saying that he was a very respectable man. It helped them to respect him, to talk like that, but it did not help me. That is how, I think, we must bring ourselves to regard this language of theirs. It seems to us bad language, but the meaning is not always bad. I found the men who used it on the whole very good men. I even found them very tolerant men, often more so than their white neighbours. Even Arch- bishop Gulielmus is tolerant, because, after all, he never does strike anybody dead. He does not abuse his power. The art of writing truly is so high an art, so far beyond our present reach, that those who have essayed it most will think most charitably of the poor Blacks who have given it up. Ill As soon as we leave off reading these old books as if they were newspapers published in New York, we shall begin to understand them. It is almost time, indeed, to leave off refuting and apologising, The Eclipse 283 and to begin interpreting. To say that two thousand years ago men suddenly went out of their minds and began mistaking a mosaic of Egyptian mytho- logy for a page of Josephus may be true, and yet it may be the most idle thing that can be said about Christianity. Because it does not tell us why the Mediterranean mind turned inside out. To-day there is no science so exact as astronomy. It is only one remove from Pure Mathematics. The very Zodiac has been nailed to the sun, as far as words can do it, so that we still speak of the sun as in the Sign of Aries, while he is actually rising in the star-group of the Fishes. And there is no Cinderella so despised as astrology. Darwin has pointed out in a footnote that our descent from the little tidal creature called the Ascidian may account for the moon-pulse of warm-blooded life. But even he only ventured to put that in a footnote, perhaps for fear of the astronomers, which is the key to as- trology, and was the beginning of astronomy. Exact science is so busy with her exact measures that she is apt to turn a little angrily from any attempt to apply those measures for the material benefit of mankind. But for the old astrologers the measures were only means to an end. They wanted to make the stars useful. These Signs of theirs were weather signs. They did not know there were extinct volcanoes in the moon, but they knew all about that moon-pulse in themselves. Their science, like our science, was their religion. And thus they drew no hard and fast line between the lore of heaven and the lore of Heaven. We see they could not, before writing was invented. 284 The New Word We learn from their mistakes. We see them trying, like other scientists, to be too exact. They tried to make the stars work overtime. They made their picture book in the sky, and then sought to read too much in it, mistaking their own pothooks and hangers for the Cuneiform of God. The strange thing is that they did not always, and altogether, read it wrong. They had a great deal of trouble with the stars. Those stars are like men, they will not always go as they ought. You build your temple, your long stone telescope, pointing to where a star ought to rise, and lo ! after a thousand years or so, it rises somewhere else, and you have to build a new temple. But what is this greatest change of all ? Lo ! Heaven itself is on the move, the eternal Picture-Book is turning over one by one its mighty leaves, the im- mortal Sun himself after two thousand years deserts his mansion in the sky, and passes from Sign to Sign. This was the change which so shook the mind of those old learners that in their mystic speech they named it the End of an Age, the beginning of a New Heaven and a New Earth. And when their words came into the streets, when they were peddled in chap- books, and caught up by every sufferer longing for better things, by every captive in a dungeon and by every slave bleeding under the lash, and by every Idealist dreaming dreams of Righteousness, what wonder if they fulfilled themselves. We catch the echo of this far-famed prediction all round the Mediterranean shores. Alexander thought of it. Caesar thought of it. Plato wrote of it. Virgil wrote of it. It passed from Jewry into The Eclipse 285 the catacombs. The Book of Daniel breathes of it. The Book of Enoch is full of it. The Apocalypse is it. The Roman slaves drew the mysterious Fish of the New Covenant on the ground as their secret password long before any one had begun to draw a Cross. When they were shown that its Greek name, i-c-th-u-s was an acrostic on the name of Jesus Christ, they had nothing more to ask. The Sign of Jonah had been given to them. The early Christians were called Little Fishes, and the early preachers Fishermen. What strikes me under it all is that, whatever words they used, the old astrologers were right. Their world did come to an end. Before their time the White man, whom we know as Zarathustra, had reached the first great generalisa- tion which brought order out of the chaos of my- thology. He had polarised idolatry in two Antagonists who played the same parts as our Energy and Force. He had identified them, not by the words Bright and Might, but as the Bright One and the Dark One. And, going on to use the two words that seem to me the most shifty of meaning in all human speech, he had declared the Bright One to be Good, and the Dark One, Evil. His theology was the theology of conquerors. And it was this theology that Christianity overthrew. It was the Bright One that fell from Heaven, and was bound for a thousand years, while the Dark One ascended into Heaven, and reigned during the Dark Age. It was metastrophe. It was hope turning inside out. 286 The New Word The world did end. That old, bright pagan world did end. The old Gods vanished from their Olympus. The oracles grew dumb. The great Pan lay dead. We can see men sinking down and falling asleep all round the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. We see the rulers drooping, and wearying of their task. We see the scholars ceasing to write, and the soldiers ceasing to fight. We see the hunted slaves creeping out of their sewers with their old mysteries and shocking rites. The books of science are burned. The schools are closed. The Idiots put down the Gnostics. The beautiful literature is lost, or scrawled over with senseless legends that read like the talk of men in a nightmare. We see the Northern folks descending on the exhausted southern lands, only to fall under the spell. It is God's Spell. The mind of man has turned inside out. It is the Reign of the Saints. The world has gone to sleep for a thousand years. It is Ragnarok the Twilight of the Gods. We have been living in the New Jerusalem while the Millennium has come and gone. IV The words of the old prophets seem senseless enough to us, but so did other hieroglyphs till Cham- The Eclipse 287 pollion had found the key. And neither did the priests, nor did the prophets, write all they knew. Neither were they able to do so ; neither is any man able to write all he knows. Somehow or other, it seems to me that those as- trologers were weather-wise, that they foreknew that millennial ebb and flow of heat and light that was to dry up Lake Tchad and unfreeze the Baltic ; that giant tidal wave in the sun that was to sweep the empire of Rome before it like an egg-shell, and wash up the wreckage of Thebes and Babel on the shores of Scandinavia. Their memorable prophecy has been memorably fulfilled. Some day we may be able to see in this the hand- writing of the Man Outside, and to take to heart the tremendous Lesson. Some day we may be allowed to show the apologists for Christianity the meaning of the word Christ. In the meantime the pressing business seems to be to prevent the new shell from hardening. And it is hardening very fast. The new religion is to-day much more sure of itself than the old religion, much more positive, more catholic, in a word, more materialistic. It has already taken over the word faith. " By faith," cries a distinguished prophet of the new religion, who prophesies in wheels and gases, in the machine, the triangle and the lethal chamber, " by faith we disbelieve ! " And what is it that the Materialist so heroically disbelieves^? It is the evidence of his senses. Out of the millions of waves forever flowing in 288 The New Word and out of us from the Strength Without, whose best name is Heaven, our little strength-conductors gather a few here and there to keep the body safe, and from these few we try to piece together a Meaning by which we can live, as the bird pieces together sticks and straws to make itself a nest. But the bird's nest is not the dome of Saint Sophia. There are other senses than the celebrated five of Alexandrian lore ; and the Siberian shaman in his swoon, the dervish in his dance, the animal in its sleep, the very trees and flowers, feel waves that we have left off feeling, and know what we have forgotten how to know. With us sight has killed second-sight. The Past is too much with us ; and the Future not enough. If we will think roundly and speak sensibly, we shall know that the Beyond is not less real than the Near, the Future not less real than the Past. It is the Present that is unreal, a meeting-point only ; and in these lives of ours the metastrophe of Future and Past becomes the metastrophe of Hope and Memory. Are we nothing but a makeshift between Heredity and Environment ? But Hope is the greatest part of our environment. It is the Pull of Heaven. It is the Energy of Longing. It is the Swirl. The story of creation that tries to leave out hope will leave out sense unawares. For the environment of Earth is Heaven. The Eclipse 289 The Idealist cannot halt between the old and new religions. His face is turned ever towards the east. The new religion is his ; because he foresaw it, he foretold it, he founded it, he witnessed for it, in bonds and in death, what time the very men who are now persecuting Christians were persecuting Scientists, and they who are now torturing beasts for Man's sake, were torturing men for God's sake. But the prophet of a new religion cannot be also its priest. As it becomes orthodox, so he will become heterodox. Because the Idealist founded the new religion it will excommunicate him. Let there be no mistake about this. The Idealist may build temples ; he does not dwell in them. He is never an archbishop ; he remains ever the prophet. To mankind and let us believe for the material benefit of mankind, or let us believe the All-Thing an everlasting Hoax the Idealist is always saying what Remigius said to the Frankish king, " Burn what you have learned ; learn what you have burned." Who can make him an archbishop ? Who can patronise the Idealist, except some greater Idealist ? England will always have fifteen thousand a year for some respectable clergyman ; she will never have it for Shelley or Carljie. 290 The New Word The Idealist on his side knows what he has to expect of mankind. The crucifix set up at the entrance to every Catholic village, Lamartine has written, is Humanity's warning to the Idealist, a warning given in vain : " We know the price, and yet our gifts we strew, Our lilt-blood and our tears to feed the lamp God orders us to bear in front of you." In our sun-whirl there is one planet which has a moon which is turning the other way. And if it be strong enough, and last long enough, sooner or later the whole mighty Wheel of Light will return and follow that one little moon. There is the home of the homeless Idealist, in that far-off spot his vantage- ground ; that moon is his fiery chariot. For here he has no continuing city, but he seeks one to come. TWENTIETH HEAD THE BOOK OF ETIQUETTE Translation. i. The Energy of Longing. 2. Dia- gram of Life. 3. The Art of Living. 4. Groundless Fear. 5. Ethical Sing-song. 6. The New Church. 7. The Unknown God. BY this time the Testator's word has so far un- folded that we are able to see somewhat of his meaning. The Swedish word for ideal seems to be hopp, the English hope, and a work of an idealist tendency to be neither more nor less than a hopeful work. A hope differs from a thought, and an ideal from an idea, in that it has a tendency. It has going strength. 291 292 The New Word It is not the builder's plan, but rather the house- holder's desire, of which the house is in some measure the fulfilment. It is indefinite because strength is in- definite, and if it were definite it would be dead. Hope is a term of strength, like energy ; it may be called the energy of longing. The children call it looking forward, which is the very etymology of idealist. It is by metaphor that we speak of a hope, or an ideal. That is an abstract word used as the name for an imaginary point towards which the energy of longing works, and, as we have seen, it is an extreme point and an extravagant one. To fix the mind on this imaginary point instead of on the real strength is a cardinal error, and to refute it has been my first care in this interpretation. For the sound mind, the only real point is the Man Inside, whose circumference is the Man Outside ; and the way of strength which is called Hope works between them. > All strength turns inside out, and we try to follow it with our names. The strength which leaves the sun as energy of light is called force of attraction whenas it leads the plant out of the soil, and the flower out of the plant ; and again, within the flower, it is called energy of growth. Man is the flower and not the sun, and the attraction which leads the man out of the beast, and the angel out of the man, h known to himself as longing, or hope. I have tried to show that this way of strength is as real as the force of gravitation. The swirl is the mathematical demonstration of hope, and the universe is the mathematical demonstration of the The Book of Etiquette 293 swirl. For there is an annex to the universe ; but it is not|jbuilt of words only, and it does not stand empty, but in it there abides an immortal Guest, whose name is Hope. The Way of hope is marked off from the Way called heredity as the pull is marked off from the push. We are led as well as driven. Hope wrestles with heredity in the shaping of life, and evolution is the triumph of hope over heredity. To say other- wise were to say that there is no growth, and no ife. . ,, Hope, therefore, must be half of the true story of creation. Beyond the struggle for existence is the struggle for a better existence. The survival of the fittest turns out to be the survival of the fore- most, which is the creation of a higher type. The fittest for the past is not the fittest for the future, and it is the fittest for the future who is the elect of Hope. The Tree of Life grows upward, and it is the breath of life that has changed up into hope. 294 The New Word II In its full meaning the word hope may be made to cover all man's work. It is hope that leads the veriest Materialist to learn from sense, and hope that turns the lesson to use for mankind's benefit. Nothing is so practical as hope. History itself is only busy idleness unless it can turn into prophecy. But though hope spreads out fan-wise, instead of narrowing to a point, the Testator has clearly outlined the department of hope which he meant to endow. The Idealist is placed by him between the scientific discoverer on the one hand, and the practical pioneer of kindness on the other, both working for the bene- fit of mankind. Between these two the Idealist stands like an interpreter, whose business it should be to turn the lessons of science into rules of beha- viour. Idealism is first of all the science of hope, learning the will of Heaven from the voice within, as Materialism learns it from the voice without. So far as I can look into the mind of the Testator he sought in these two sciences, not a contradiction, but a collaboration, like that of the centripetal and centrifugal forces The Book of Etiquette 295 which are supposed to guide a planet in its course. This may be illustrated by a simple diagram : Materialism Sense The science of hope is languishing to-day, and I have thought it not the least part of this inquiry to investigate the causes of this aberration, and suggest a remedy. Its chairs are filled, and its endowments are embezzled, by men who are still living in the Dark Age. They are good men, or so I like to think, but their work is not good, and they are blocking the way of better men. They seem to me like old women who should stand round a burning house with pails in their hands, faithfully throwing their paltry dribble 296 The New Word on the flames, but keeping back the engine which alone can put out the fire. This legacy is certainly not meant for them. It is a summons to the firemen. That seems to me the whole point. Here is not a prize for a new religion, for what is called science is the new religion. But here is a prize for a new hope, and it would not have been offered if the old hope were still strong and bright. My chief end in this inquiry has been to show that this at bottom is a question of words, but to show at the same time that that does not lessen the importance of the question ; because words are the signposts of hope. If the weathervane be stuck fast and useless the wind will still blow, but that is no excuse for the weathervane. I have tried to show that the old words are outlandish words, as well as out-of-date words, and to point to where better words may be found. The folk-lore of the Black man has had a long innings in the North, and it is time to give the White man's folk-lore a turn. It is only my own judgment, but it is one not lightly nor hastily formed ; and I think that the secret lies here, and that this is the remedy for hope's disease. It is a very gradual remedy, and that is why I hope so much from it. Before this Will can be fully carried out, before we can have truly hopeful works competing with one another for this Prize, we must have a generation, perhaps several generations, of writers who have been brought up on truth, and encouraged to write truthfully. For it is verihood that is difficult, hope comes of its own accord wherever The Book of Etiquette 297 it has leave. But, to begin with, the mind must have light and air and freedom. The bandages must be taken off the brain. The laws against hope must be repealed. The Idealist of our day works like the medieval alchemist by stealth and in dread of men, and his books are not sound and sensible. In the last genera- tion an admired idealist wrote many books in praise of medieval churches and medieval manners and medieval hopes. Had this admired writer thoroughly asked himself the question, To what end do we build to-day ; what is our best hope ; and in what building may we express it best ? had he gone to work in that spirit, then, although his search had ended in the bottom of a drain, he might have helped his fellows to build a better drain, and been not a preacher but a teacher. On this head the Testator has left us in no doubt, that he did not want works of a useless tendency. He did not want beautiful words about hope, nor words that would go round and round hope, but words that would help men to hope, and by helping them to hope, help them to live. 198 The New Word in The Art of life is that high art which children name Behaviour, and as art is the end of science, so beautiful behaviour is the end of hope. If it were not so, Nobel would not have wasted his money on Idealism, nor I my labour. Here is the highest and most difficult art in the world, and yet the one in which each is called to be an artist ; the art which any man, hi any walk of life, may excel in, but in which no man may achieve perfection. Not even K'ung the Master achieved perfection, if he is now worshipped alongside of Heaven. Not even the Buddha achieved perfection, if the Gods in Heaven now worship him. When I look around me, and see so many men and women, of such differing creeds, of such varying degrees of knowledge, and under such manifold temptations, all trying to behave as well as their infirmities will let them, and behaving so much better than myself, I feel it is almost unkind to quarrel with them because their words are so much uglier than their deeds. And yet nowhere, perhaps, are Andronican words much worse than in Talk about Behaviour, and The Book of Etiquette 299 nowhere are they more heedlessly flung out. The word Love is the most dangerous in the dictionary. If we should ask any Christian to tell us the key- word of his religion, he would answer, Love. And if we should ask any other man what religion had engendered the most hatred, he would answer, Christianity. If those who use this word so recklessly would keep in mind that love and hate are in meta- strophe ; that the more they are loving in one direction, the more they are hating in another, and that it is hard for them to help one man without hurting another ; if before they set out on those crusades of theirs, they would ask themselves, To whom am I going to be cruel ? how much more gentle their behaviour might become. Again, as I walk through this world I hear going up from many earnest souls the cry, Tell us how to behave ! Teach us the Rule of Bight ! Make us a Moral Code ! And, unhappily as they think, happily as I think, no one knows quite how to behave ; there is no Rule of Right ; the Moral Code cannot be made. Not even the lawyers, with their magical sum of money, can make it ; how much less then the mere moral philosophers and ethic-mongers, who have not even a Court. The kindest saying I have found in all the words of men is this : One man's meat is another man's poison. That is the idealist rule : not Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you ; but Do unto others as they would have you do unto them. Each of us has his own Moral Code, and makes 300 The New Word it as he goes along, and changes it as his mind changes and grows. We know that the perfect Moneymaker will kill any one for a dollar, but that he makes an admirable Sunday-school teacher. We know that the perfect Idealist would make a poor policeman, but that if you were to set down a bag of gold on the desk in front of him, and afterwards take it away again, he would hardly notice what you were doing. It is not well to be troubled over much even about behaviour. It is good for us sometimes to think that our behaviour does not matter very much to any one beside ourselves. The stars go on shining very steadily, summer and winter follow one another, the flowers spring up in their season, and the song- birds carol in the sky. IV Why is it that, while I see everywhere around me men whose manners are better than their words, yet they are all anxious to persuade me that it is the words that bring about the good manners ? The astrologers seem to have persuaded them that a reform of the kalendar will be followed by bloodshed in the streets. Much of this seems to be the backwash of the great French Revolution. The educated European mind The Book of Etiquette 301 has been marking time for a hundred years, out of fear of the mob. Frederick of Prussia, Catherine of Russia, that strange, ill-starred Idealist on a throne who founded the Swedish Academy, were all more enlightened than kings have ventured to be since. The Revolution frightened the rich. And the astro- logers have seen their opportunity. They have persuaded the poor rich men that that great jacquerie was a scientific orgy. There were no starving serfs up and down France. There were no heartless, worthless lords. There was no bankrupt, foolish king. There was no Bastille for idealists ; and no Idealist named Rousseau. The kingship did not bring the kingdom to utter wreck, and then call in a desperate mob to put things straight for it. The old regime did not commit suicide. No ; all that is a mistake. There was a wit named Voltaire, and he was allowed to say witty things about the astrologers, and because of that the mob rose and cut the rich men's throats. And because of that Mammon to-day sits on guard, with his Mass-book in one hand, and his Maxim in the other, watching for Truth as a terrier watches for a rat. The policy of the poor, frightened rich men is the policy of the ostrich. They build their churches, and patch up their cathedrals, and hire respectable clergy- men at enormous salaries to make-believe that the earth is flat, and meanwhile Columbus has discovered the new world, and Copernicus has discovered the sun, and Darwin has discovered life. And not one of the poor rich men is a penny the worse. Their fear is groundless. No one wants to cut 302 The New Word their throats. No one wants to rob them. The Socialist wants them to pay their poor-rate, and by withholding it they create Socialism. The poor man asked them for bread, and they have given him a vote ; and now they must pay in taxes more than they refused as alms. The Idealist is not thinking of their gold at all. He is not asking bread but freedom, And Hope is a dangerous prisoner. On the whole there never has been a time during the last two thousand years when the astrology had so little real hold on men's minds as it has to-day, and there never has been a time when the behaviour of men towards one another was on the whole so good. The untightening of dogma and the bettering of behaviour have pretty nearly kept pace together. And a hundred years after the French Revolution a White folk, called on to choose between kingship and commonwealth, have chosen kingship. Who was the first to write under words like " The kingdom of heaven is within your own hearts " the label " Poetry ; " and under words like " Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched " the label " Exact Geography " ? The story of the Good Samaritan is not an astrological myth. The good seed of the Idealist has been choked by the astrologer's tares. The Book of Etiquette 303 There is a slang word in use among us, cant, which seems to be in English sing-song. It is our old enemy the magic spell, but in its dotage, and grown too feeble to withstand any searching test. It is more beloved in England than in any other country in the world, and for that very reason. The English are a practical people, and the spell that gives way most readily before a sum of money is the one that suits them best. It is not easy for foreigners to understand the English character. You think that they are fighting to the death over whether their children shall be taught the gospel according to Queen Elizabeth, or the gospel according to the London County Council ; but when you go among them, you find that they do not mind what their children are taught, so long as they do not have to pay for it ; that the whole quarrel is over that ; and that quite a number of them are cheerfully sending their children to schools opened by the cast- out monks and nuns of other countries, to be taught the gospel according to Ignatius Loyola. Let us see if we can talk about behaviour without dropping into sing-song. It seems to be true that there is hardly anything, 304 The New Word from mother-slaying down to Sabbath-breaking, which one man at one time thinks to be right, which another man at another time, or even at the same time, does not think to be wrong. I cannot think of anything which is to-day in one country punished as a crime which has not been yesterday, or in another country, practised as a virtue and preached as a religion. In our own time and country, while every one repeats the same moral Hie haec hoc, each one interprets it to please himself, and keeps it or breaks it as his wishes prevail over his fears. In order to learn how men really feel about behaviour there seems to be no way open but to look past what they are saying to what they are doing. And accord- ingly, when I wish to find a moral code that really is believed in and obeyed, when I want to find the true Levitical law of the age, I have to put on one side all the Ethical masterpieces, all the tomes of Moral Philosophy, all the sermons and the tracts, and to begin with a very humble, and not at all distinguished, treatise calling itself the Book of Etiquette. The Book of Etiquette is, according to its lights, the book ?f the knowledge of good and evil behaviour. It is wonderfully free from sing-song. It does not use many Andronican words. It does not take high ground with its readers ; it only tells them how they must behave if they wish to be thought ladies and gentlemen. It utters no threats ; it holds up no punishments. And yet I find there is no lawgiver so willingly obeyed as the lawgiver who writes this little book. When must I call on my friends ; how many cards must I leave ; how many minutes must The Book of Etiquette 305 I stay ? such are the things I may learn, if I will, from this remarkable book. The Book of Etiquette is sometimes sneered at for teaching its readers to ape their betters. But I see nothing to sneer at, and to ape our betters seems to me a very beautiful thing to do, and a very touching thing ; and I would far rather see my fellows anxious to be thought ladies and gentlemen, than hear them using words like Humanity and Brotherhood. I find nothing about bombs in the Book of Etiquette. And if the people of England should ever look at it from my point of view, they will sink their differences about Queen Elizabeth, and begin from the beginning with the Book of Beautiful Behaviour. For it is a work of a hopeful tendency. VI There have been times when I have been tempted to join those good men who are trying to reform the Church. And then again I have looked at that 306 The New Word lightning conductor, and seen that it was reforming the church faster than any words of theirs or mine could do. In the end I have looked round me and found growing up unawares the New Church. The Club is to the Book of Etiquette what the Church was to theology. It is the real thing instead of the explanation, the house and not the plan. If we wish to learn how men feel about behaviour to-day, we must go to the clubs. They are the (Ecumenical Council of our time, with power to bless and to curse. No one any longer minds being excommunicated by this or that clerical authority, but everybody minds being expelled by his club. The old priesthood no longer dares to beard the sinner by name, if he live any nearer than Constantinople. The new priesthood takes the sinner by the scruff of his neck, and thrusts him out. The new Church does not deal in Andronican language. All its theology and ethics are summed up in the two short words Good Form. And perhaps those are the only ethical words in use among us which are never sing-song. So, while the moral philosophers are writing their moral codes, and the teachers of ethics are piling up their Mediterranean words, the clubs have quietly got hold of their own unwritten code, and are shaping mankind by it. Now the grand merit which I find in this new church is that it is not a catholic church. It is the other way about. It is the Exclusive Church. It does not force the sinner and the dissenter to come in, but tries its very hardest to keep them outside. And in that I find more hope for mankind than in The Book of Etiquette 307 any other observation I have made since I came to live among them. When we have laid the lesson of the Club to heart, the world will be changed. We shall no longer try to take the Black Man into the White Man's Club against our will, nor the Yellow Man against his will. There will be no more great empires, and no more oppressed nationalities ; no more crusades, and therefore no more pilgrimages of peace. There will be no more laws, and no more prisons. There will be no more creeds, and no more catechisms, and the catechisms are a thousandfold more wicked than the creeds. For the Clubs are not all alike, neither are they meant to be all alike. They are meant to sort out men and women, each into his own Club, to the end that they may enjoy themselves, without marring the enjoyment of others. In the long-run they tend to mount in an upward spiral, and to draw the Rules of Good Manners from the highest Club. And that is how Hope works in the evolution of behaviour. The Coming Man is there. He is the member of the highest Club. And, as I hope, he will be neither the furious enslaver of millionairism, nor the ticketed and machine-made doll of socialism, neither will he be like the mad saint of the Dark Age. He will be first and foremost a good-tempered Man, trying to play the Game according to the Rules, and ever ready to learn, and to change the Rules of the Club when the Rules of the Game are being changed by the Man Outside. I foresee that he will not all at once beat his sword into a ploughshare, but that he will 308 The New Word in time put a button on his foil, and that when he finds he must fight, he will fall on, not spitting and snarlingjlike a beast, but like a gentleman, raising his sword to the salute, and keeping loyally the Rules of the Fencing School. VII Now I have done putting together these sticks and straws of verihood and falsehood ; and I have woven a nest, but how unlike that dome which only hope can build ! I have woven it, as though round my own mind, and yet it does not altogether follow the shape of my own mind. So does the bee, working in the midst of other bees, to fashion its round cell, find at the last that it has wrought a hexagon, for so has overwrought the bee outside. The man outside me all this time has been my Testator, with whom I have wrought as a faithful wordsmith, striking blow for blow, to forge upon the anvil of sense a definition of $ hope that should ring true in the ear of the Materialist as well as of the Idealist. I read this great Bequest as a bequest to Hope, but not to every hope. I read it as a bequest to the highest Hope, and to the Interpretation of that Hope. I read it as a prayer for Light. I read it The Book of Etiquette 309 as the prayer of one who walked in darkness, but hoped for light ; and as an appeal from the darkness to the Light. I have seen an altar to the Unknown God. TWENTY-FIRST HEAD THE HEIR The Swedish Academy. i. The Palm. THE task to which the Trustees of this bequest are called is the highest and the most difficult yet offered by a man to men. If fchis Will is to be carried out it can only be in spite of many mistakes. Many an impostor, many a charlatan, must receive the Nobel Prize. Others, again, must seem to receive it. The prize must be denied to yonder stately Aeneid swelling with the majesty of Rome, and must be given to what inco- herent argument, written in what slave's dialect, by this tentmaker of Tarsus. For the prophet is only against his will a writer. His utterance is most often broken and disjointed. His words are hints, not definitions, and parables rather I than commandments. The spirit that moves him is^beyond his own control, and when the virtue has gone out of him he is no more, often he is less, than other men. The Trustees cannot rely on any aid from outside themselves. For the prophet is not without honour save in his own country, and in his own generation, and in his own Academy. 310 The Heir 311 They cannot carry out the Will without taking the place once held by General Councils, and by Colleges of Pontiffs, whose seat was on another sea. They must, by their bestowal of this legacy, choose between the books of hope, and draw up the canon of the scriptures of the new world. The last canon was drawn up by mobs of howling bishops only kept by Roman soldiery from shedding each other's blood. The new one is to be drawn up by a com- mittee of men of letters meeting quietly in the far North to dispose of a sum of money not their own, and thereby helping to shape the new hope of man- kind. Was not something like this in the mind of the Testator ; and did it not form part of his purpose that his country should renew her old renown, and become in the new age of peace, as once and again in the past ages of war, the sword and buckler of mankind against the enslavers, of the spirit as of the frame ? Did not his vision show him the new Hall of the Aesir, rebuilt in the White City of the North, the City of Hope, to be a refuge and a place of comfort for the exiles of the spirit, whither as to a lighthouse voyagers from all lands should turn their eyes in long- ing ; a hearth of glory " Whither, as to a fountain, other stars Repair, and in their golden urns draw light," 312 The New Word Gentlemen of the Swedish Academy, If you should ever so far honour these struggling words as to read them, and, if it may be so, find in them anything not written altogether vainly, you may allow me a last word face to face. It is written in the book of Mang the Learner, whom we are taught to call Mencius, that the great man is he who has kept his child's heart. You are great men, and therefore you have kept your child's heart, and it is to that heart that I am writing, and not to those great men before whose company I have no title by which I may appear. Give me leave to wrestle with the Child in the Swedish Academy on behalf of a child outside. The child is my client in this case. I have nothing more to say on behalf of the Idealist. He enters into this matter as the Testator's hireling, and not as his heir. The labourer is worthy of his hire, accord- ing to his labour. It is for you to mark out the work, and bestow the hire when it is earned. I ask you now to think of the child. To spell the word childhood with a capital letter, and make of it a new idol such as that word humanity, The Heir 313 would be to bring a new folly into a crowded world. For the child is only the coming man ; and the question is how he can be helped most to become the best man. Let us ask him. And listen ! that which we call education, the child himself calls cramming. When you are setting about the drawing up of that great canon of the books of hope, I ask you not to forget the lesson-books of the child. I know of no books of a more materialistic tendency than most of them are. Think it not too far beneath the dignity of letters to begin the new literature where the child begins. It is the first book that counts. By the time you have written the child's catechism you have half written the man's creed. Deem it not wrong to think a little of the brightest child, as your Testator thought of the brightest man ; the child who is to lead the other children, and, by leading, serve them. Let him be your first care. Give light to him. Let his brain grow. Tear off the bandages that will not let it grow. Unscrew the iron clamps. Give the child freedom to become a man. Before we can have hopeful books we must have hopeful words. That is the gist of all my argument. Let me leave off with one such word. It shall be the word palm, which lexicographers tell us is the Latin palma, and means a tree that grows in Africa and the Levant. And on a day called in our kalendar Palm Sunday, African-minded men are taking children into their Latin buildings, and putting into their hands dead leaves from the Levant, and bidding them think of children in Jeru- 314 The New Word salem two thousand years ago. But the country folk on that day take living flowers, and place them on the tombs of their dead, as a sign of the new life, and they call the day Flowering Sunday. Now one day in spring, while I was first pondering what I should write to you, I had been reading a book by a French writer, the name of which was The Cathedral. The writer begins by praising the atmosphere of his cathedral, as he says, with its mild, flat air as of a cellar, and its faint smell of oil. And laying down the book, I walked out in the fields with some friends of mine, and presently we came to a stream, in whose bed I saw some bushes budding and growing ; and I happened to ask my friends what they were. The answer was that they were palms. I was puzzled. With my Latharnised mind I could not understand this answer. I could only think of the Mediterranean palms. I asked my friends again ; and they told me, " When they are like that the country people call them palms." As soon as I heard of the country people I knew of course that I was listening to a greater authority on the English language than Doctor Latham. I questioned my friends further, and learned that this name was given, not only to the bushes by the stream, but to others ; that it was not the name of the plants, but of the branches, and even more of the buds ; that it was not only a noun but a verb, since the country folk say that the willows are palming, when the life within them begins to swell forth. And thus I saw that I was dealing with an old, old word, perhaps not The Heir 315 the same word with the Latin palma at all, bub onty spelt the same way, perhaps a word carried southward by the forefathers of Rome ; at any rate a word rooted in the north for ages before the Romans ever heard of Britain. I followed this word to the Baltic Sea. I found it beside Lake Wetter, bearing the same meaning to the country folk, dressed in the same foreign spelling by the learned. I found that in Finland, where no Roman monk has ever trod, where Christianity is a thing of yesterday, where neither Aryan words nor Latin spellings have taken root, the Finnish folk went forth on a day in spring, and plucked these living palms, and decked their homes with them. And coming back, I found an old man whom I know very well, born in the Isle of Wight, and long a town- dweller, going out on a day in spring, and plucking these very palms, and decking his home with them, without knowing why. I have not yet been able to persuade any philologist that this immemorial instinct is not, name and thing, a Roman lesson. And consider how the materialist, by shutting his eyes to the prophetic significance of words, misses even their history. For the key to this old folk word was given to me by a little Swiss child in the Jura, whom I overheard using the name paume for a ball ; the old French name which the French word-books now confine to the base of the hand, and the game of tennis. And so the expression palm of the hand is seen to have the same origin as ball of the thumb ; and we can follow it up to the word paumure, the place on a stag's head from which the horns swell 3 1 6 The New Word and sprout, and thence to the palming willows. Doubt- less the country folk know nothing about the Roman incantations of the learned ; for them this word is quick and not dead ; and in their ears Palming Sunday suggests the renewal of life, and not the worship of dead Mediterranean leaves. When I had read that tiny riddle it seemed to me that this word palm might be used to sum up the great question of our day. Whether is it better that, when this day in Spring comes round, we should take White children into that Black building, with its mild, flat air as of a cellar, and its faint reek of oil; and put into their hands dried leaves from the Levant ; and say to them, " This is because of what some little Jewish children did two thousand years ago ; " or is it better that we lead them out into the fields, into the fresh air of Heaven ; and show to them the true palms ; and say to them, " This is the Day of the Buds. The winter is over, the spring is here, and the Great Life outside us is renewing itself again. We hope that it is telling us that our life, too, will be renewed, and that we shall go on from life to life, ever learning and knowing more of that Great Life that our forefathers called God." There is the question that Idealism must answer, or perish. The task of Idealism is not to reconcile Science with Religion, which means to drag down the White Man's faith to the level of the Black Man's fancy ; but to reconcile Science with Literature, to put closer knowledge into more glorious words, and, in the beginning, to tell children the truth. What answer the child wants us to give to the ques- The Heir 317 tion we know already. No man shall ever tell me that the child does not want to be told the truth. The child cannot be silenced. He cannot be got rid of. He is always coming into the world, and he is always asking to be told the truth. Why not tell the child the truth ? Give the child leave to grow. Give the child leave to live. Give the child leave to hope, and to hope truly. He is my client. I have high warrant for what I do. I set him in the midst of the Swedish Academy. He is the plaintiff in this case. I say he is mankind. I say he is the heir of Alfred Bernhard Nobel, and that his birthright is the truth. Gentlemen of the Swedish Academy, consider of your verdict. PRINTED BY WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. 1'LYMOUTH University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. APR 13 LD-URf MAR 2 3 1998 j ""jv " "" " | " ""I inn UNI III II in || Uni