A great thinker spends half his life in explaining his theory and the other half in explaining it away. As a matter of fact, most of the advanced have thus retired; or those who strode forward stopped or stepped back. Even Mr. Bernard Shaw, who seems to grow more right every day, began so very wrong that he could not himself avoid putting himself right. He once denounced all general ideals for the testing of particular actions, and said that the only golden rule is that there is no golden rule. In theory he was purely opportunist; that is, in theory he was against all theories. But even in some of his earliest quarrels, such as that on Vivisection, he was not really opportunist at all. He was obviously acting on the general principle that the ideal of Mercy must overrule all opportunism. The good old golden rule was back in all its glory; and even frogs and guinea-pigs must profit by the universal commandment to do as we would be done by. Shaw has never carried through any Shavian philosophy; he has expanded, but at the expense of his theory not being extended. As for Wells, he has had so many theories that he would need to borrow the three hundred years of Methuselah from Shaw, in order to fulfil any of them. But, any how, he has not fulfilled any of them. Mr. Britling did not see it through: that is exactly what the Wellsian heroes do not do.

  It is the same with nearly all the great men of the sceptical school. People talk of the pessimism of Thomas Hardy as ruthless; and in its artistic method it was ruthless, often at the expense of reason and probability. But if he changed spiritually, it was always towards feeling less of the ruthlessness and more of the ruth. I should be very much surprised to learn that Hardy, especially in later life, was really a pessimist at all. His theory, as a theory, is not very clear or complete; but I am sure he did not become more clear or more complete, in the sense of more convinced of a dogma of despair. Consciously or unconsciously, the tendency is almost always the other way. Hardy recoiled from the Hardy philosophy, just as Shaw recoiled from the Shaw philosophy, and most of the anarchs and atheists recoil from the anarchist and atheist philosophy. Much of their later ingenuity is employed in trying to mend with their wisdom what they have broken with their wit. It is so easy to say something to start with that sounds splendidly sensible, and so difficult afterwards to reconcile it with common sense. A man like Mr. Arnold Bennett will say that nobody should be praised or blamed, because temperamental tendencies are so inevitable. But a man like Mr. Arnold Bennett has no more intention than I have of really walking, in broad daylight, through the real world, without ever blaming or praising anybody. All this that calls itself Modern Thought is a series of false starts and belated stop pages. It starts by believing in nothing, and it ends by getting nowhere. But the point is that, even if it ever gets anywhere, it no longer even tries to get where it originally wanted to go.

  The explanation, as I have said, is simple enough. Anybody can throw out a suggestion, in the sense of throwing away a suggestion. The brilliant books of Mr. H. G. Wells almost entirely consist of suggestions that he has thrown away. But it is very different if the idea comes back like a boomerang to the hand, and we do not always find it easy to handle. The negative writers of the nineteenth-century tradition were always creating a sensation by offering to abolish something, or (like Bakunin) to abolish everything. But that sort of generalization is only a sensation; it is not really a system. It is a facile triumph to reveal the great truth that all men are really quadrupeds. The difficulty is, as life goes on and love and friendship become more subtle or many-sided, to live a complete human existence while still going about on all fours. It is great fun to thrill the mob by saying it consists entirely of suicidal maniacs; the difficulty is what to do next, except commit suicide. What generally happens is that great men gradually grow sane; and, having begun ‘with the enjoyment of being extraordinary, end with the more mystical beatitude of becoming ordinary. They begin each with his own wild and generally inhuman philosophy; but by the end they have, in a sense somewhat different from that of the old phrase, joined the religion of all sensible men.

  XXIII. On the Mythology of Scientists

  W HAT I venture to criticize in certain men, whom some call scientists and I call materialists, is their perpetual use of Mythology. One half of what they say is so true as to be trite; the other half of what they say is so untrue as to be transparent. But they cover both their platitudes and their pretences by an elaborate parade of legendary and allegorical images. I read this in some remarks on Darwinism by one of the last surviving Darwinians: ‘Among the individuals of every species there goes on, as Malthus had realized, a competition or struggle for the means of life, and Nature selects the individuals which vary in the most successful direction.’ Now when men of the old religions said that God chose a people or raised up a prophet, at least they meant something; and they meant what they said. They meant that a being with a mind and a will used them in an act of selection. But who is Nature, and how does she, or he, or it, manage to select anything or anybody? All that the writer actually has to say is that some individuals do emerge when other individuals are extinguished. it hardly needed either Darwin or Darwinians to tell us that. But Nature selecting those that vary in the most successful direction means nothing whatever, except that the successful succeed. But this tautological truism is wrapped up in clouds of mythology, by the introduction of a mythical being whom even the writer regards as a myth. The reader is to be impressed and deluded by the vision of a vast stone goddess sitting on a mountain throne, and pointing at a particular frog or rabbit and saying, in tones of thunder, that this alone is to survive. All we know is that it does survive (for the moment), and then we pride ourselves on being able to repeat the mere fact that it does survive in half a hundred variegated and flowery expressions: as that it has survival value; or that it is naturally selected for survival; or that it survives because it is the fittest for survival; or that Nature’s great law of the survival of the fittest sternly commands it to survive. The critics of religion used to say that its mysteries were mummeries; but these things are in the special and real sense mummeries. They are things offered to a credulous congregation by priests who know them to be mummeries. It is impossible to prove that the priests know that there is no god in the shrine, or no truth in the oracle. But we know that the materialist knows that there is no such thing as a large fastidious lady, called Nature, who points a finger at a frog.

  The particular case in which this mythological metaphor was used is of course another matter. It is, indeed, a matter which has involved at various times a great deal of this element of materialist mythology. To see what truth was really in it we should have to go back to the old Darwinian debate; which I have not the least intention of doing here. But I may observe, in passing, that this notion of Nature selecting things is specially incompatible with all that can really be said for their own case; and that the very name of natural selection is a most unnatural name for it. For it is their whole case that everything happened, in the ordinary human sense, by accident. We should rather call it coincidence; and some of us call it quite incredible coincidence. But, anyhow, the whole case for it is that one quadruped happened to have a longer neck, and happened to live at a moment when it was necessary to reach a taller tree or shrub. If these happenings happen to happen about a hundred times in succession, in exactly the same way, you can by that process turn some sort of sheep or goat into a giraffe. Whether this is probable or not is another question. But the whole Darwinian argument is that it is not a case of Nature selecting, any more than of God selecting, or any one else selecting, but a case of things falling out in that fashion. We are quite ready to discuss trees and giraffes in their place, without perpetual references to God. Could the materialists not so far control their rhetorical and romantic sentimentalism as to do it without perpetual reference to Nature? Shall we make a bargain: that we will for the moment leave out our theology, if they will leave out their mythology?

  But the mythological habit is not entirely and exclusively confined to men of science, or even to materialists. This sort of mythology is rather generally scattered over the modern world. The popular form of the mythological is the metaphorical. Certain figures of speech are fixed in the modern mind, exactly as the fables of the gods and nymphs were fixed in the mind of pagan antiquity. It is astonishing to note how often, when we address a man with anything resembling an idea, he answers with some recognized metaphor, supposed to be appropriate to the case. If you say to him, ‘I myself prefer the principle of the Guild to the principle of the Trust,’ he will not answer you by talking about principles. He can be counted on to say, ‘You can’t put the clock back,’ with all the regularity of a ticking clock. This is a very extreme example of the mental break down that goes with a relapse into metaphor. For the man is actually understating his own case out of sheer love of metaphor. It may be that you can not put time back, but you can put the clock back. He would be in a stronger position if he talked about the abstraction called time; but an all-devouring appetite for figurative language forces him to talk about clocks. Of course, the real question raised has nothing to do with either clocks or time. It is the question of whether certain abstract principles, which may or may not have been observed in the past, ought to be observed in the future. But the point is here that even the man who means that we cannot reconstruct the past can hardly ever reconstruct his own sentence in any other form except this figurative form. Without his myth, or his metaphor, he is lost.

  Another mass of metaphors is drawn from the phenomena of morning, or the fact that the sun rises; or, rather (I grovel in apology to the man of science), appears to rise. It is a perfectly natural metaphor for poets; or, indeed, for all men, in that aspect in which all men are mystics. That there is a mystery in these natural things, which the imagination understands more subtly than the reason, is true enough. Nor have I any contempt even for mythology considered as mythology. But when we want to know what somebody wants to do, when we ask a free-thinker what he thinks, and why he thinks it, it is a little tiresome to be told that he is waiting for the Dawn, or engaged at the moment in singing Songs Before Sunrise. One is tempted to retort that Dawn is not always an entirely cheerful thing, even for those who have exercised their free thought upon the conventional traditions of their own society. There is such a thing as being shot at Dawn.

  I do not mean for a moment, of course, that we should do without myths and metaphors altogether. I am constantly using them myself, and shall continue to do so. But I think we ought all to be on our guard against depending on them as a substitute for reason. Perhaps it would be well to have a Fast Day, on which we undertook to abstain from every thing but abstract terms. Let us all agree that every Friday we will do without metaphors as without meat. I am sure it would be good for the intellectual digestion.

  XXIV. On Change

  A PROFESSOR, filled with the spirit, has delivered an oracle on the subject of The Future. I do not know what he was a professor of, but I suppose he was a Professor of Prophecy. Anyhow, he belonged to that band of enthusiasts for evolution who seem to know much more about the future than they do about the past or even the present. For he was quite as scornful of the present as of the past. We are still, he said, only half-baked savages. Anyhow, some of us are still rather half-baked philosophers; and no philosopher of this school has ever yet answered the question that must have been put again and again, and which I, for one, have often put. If everything changes, including the mind of man, how can we tell whether any change is an improvement or no?

  To take a simple and even crude example. One evolutionist, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, will say he has evolved a higher morality by refusing to eat the flesh of animals; but he does so because he has retained the old ideal of pity. Another evolutionist might just as well say that he had evolved a larger morality in being free to eat the flesh of human beings; though even in talking of being free he would still appeal to the old ideal of liberty. But he could easily talk, in quite a modern manner, about the ancient horror of cannibalism being a mere prejudice, a tribal taboo, an irrational limitation of human experience. The professor’s own phrase will be found charmingly apt. He complains that we are still half-baked savages. He may well look forward to the happy day when we shall be completely baked savages.

  Now, nobody can possibly say which of these two evolutionary changes is the better, unless he keeps some standard that cannot be changed. He cannot tell whether he ought to evolve into the higher morality or into the larger morality, unless he has some principle of pity or of liberty that does not evolve at all. The professor gave, among his rather random examples, the suggestion that we must be changing for the better because women were burned three hundred years ago. Suppose I tell him that women will be vivisected three hundred years hence. I have as much right to tell him that as he has to tell me anything else; I also can roll myself in the prophet’s mantle; I also can mount the tripod and deliver the oracle. In other words, I know as much about the future as he does, or as anybody else does; which is nothing at all. But suppose it were true, as it is most certainly tenable, that some of the vivisectionists do eventually propose to extend vivisection from beasts to men; just as I have pictured the intellectuals of the New Cannibalism extending their diet from beasts to men. It will be just as easy to use a scientific jargon in defence of that vivisection as of any other vivisection. It will be just as easy to argue, as men in all ages have argued, that a minority must suffer for the sake of a community, or that such sacrifice is a sort of martyrdom for mankind. What I want to know is, how is the evolutionist to tell whether this is a forward step or a retrograde step, if his ethics are always changing with his evolution? The Vivisectionists will say then, as they say now, that true progress demands a painful but necessary investigation. The Anti-Vivisectionists will say then, as they say now, that true progress is found in increased sensibility to suffering and renunciation of force. But how is the unhappy doubter to decide which of these two versions of true progress is really true? He can only do it if he has the test of some truth that remains true. But it is the very essence of this extreme evolutionary notion of thought that no truth can really remain true. The mind is fluid and changing, as the body is fluid and changing. On this principle we may be able to say of the future that it will be a change. But we cannot say it will be an improvement; for that implies that there will always be something in common between us and our descendants; something that we are all trying to improve. Why should that something not change like everything? Is that outside the laws of evolution? Is that a special creation? Is that a miracle? Is that common standard of conscience a thing of divine origin? Dreadful thought!

  I need not say much here of the actual prophecies of the professor. They sound very like a skit or burlesque on the romances of Jules Verne or the earlier romances of H. G. Wells. Only they contain absurdities that nobody would put into a romance, or even into a burlesque. The professor was, of course, bursting with hope and progressive optimism. He thinks that everything is going very well indeed, and the world improving with wonderful rapidity. As an example of this, he says that men are losing their eyes, teeth, hair, and sense of hearing with a rapidity that raises the happiest anticipations in a humane lover of his kind. He explained that when we have got rid of all these rude and extinct organs, we should have mechanical scientific substitutes. In the simple language of our fathers, we shall have false hair, false teeth, false eyes, false ears, and everything else suitable to our false philosophy. He did not explain how soon it will be possible to manufacture that minor part of the machinery which has hitherto escaped so many inquiring mechanics; I mean the little thing that actually sees, hears, smells, speaks, and thinks. For, strange and exasperating as it seems, without that one little thing (which nobody can find anywhere) it will generally be found that telescopes cannot see by themselves, telephones can not hear by themselves, books cannot write themselves or read themselves; and a man cannot even talk entirely without thinking. Though he sometimes comes pretty near it.

  XXV. On Twilight Sleep

  IT has been blandly and placidly proposed by some publicists that persons accused of a crime should be subjected to some hypnotic influence, which some psychologists imagine to induce a condition they call Twilight Sleep; in which remarkable state it is said that a man will go on talking and can only tell the truth. I trust it is unnecessary for me to say what I think of the morality of all that sort of thing. Of its practical social effect, if it could ever have any practical social existence, I have very little doubt. What would happen, of course, would be simply this. In meek obedience to what Science had discovered, we should hang six or seven people on the unanswerable evidence of what they said in their Twilight Sleep. And then Science would make another discovery, establishing the principle of Twilight Dream-Distortions; pointing out that certain forms of error are specially likely to occur in Twilight Sleep; and speaking haughtily and distantly about their credulous forebears who, through ignorance of Distortion Phenomena, had imagined that Twilight Sleep was reliable. Meanwhile, the people we had hanged by the latest light of science (indeed in every sense a twilight of science) would continue to be dead. That is how Science really assists Law. It is quite true that there have been many martyrs of science; but they have not always been scientists.

  Of its more general and atmospheric morality, as a matter of social tone, I can only say that, if things of that sort were ever established in England, it would be the end of a rather exceptional and very fine and honourable English tradition. Our English law has had plenty of faults, which we rather tend to forget when we are content to hear the law being praised by lawyers. But it is really true that it carried almost to a quixotic point the notion of protecting the prisoner against unfair tricks or traps. Possibly it was as much sporting as chivalrous; possibly it was more chivalrous than just. But I should be sorry to see so generous a national tradition entirely swept away, even by more logical police theories from Europe, let alone a lot of half-baked quack science from America. Law is not the most magnanimous thing in the world, in any part of the world. But it would seem, at first sight, as if even law had a better sense of honour than science. Only, as I have said, this sort of science is not science. It is simply charlatanism and boosting; the work of people who take advantage at once of the popular reverence for science and the popular ignorance of it. Charlatans arc now less criticized or cross-examined than they ever were in the world before. In the darkest days they were at least examined to see whether they were witches; but now men have not only grown sceptical about the witch, but about the witch-finder. They have not only grown to doubt the quack, but the doctor who denounces the quack. Everything has become a matter of opinion, or, rather, a matter of taste; and larger and larger crowds of people simply have a taste in quacks. They move about in a mesmerized and mechanical condition, talking and thinking merely on the authority of somebody who is not an authority. In short, they are in a condition that might very properly be described as Twilight Sleep; which, if not a state in which they tell the truth about everything, is at least a state in which they can believe anything to be true.