The Intellectual Life Part 10

The difference which you describe as having arisen between your son and you on the most grave and important subject which can occupy the thoughts of men, gives the outline of a situation painful to both the parties concerned, and which lays on each of them new and delicate obligations. You do not know how common this situation is, and how sadly it interferes with the happiness of the very best and most pure-minded souls alive. For such a situation produces pain only where both parties are earnest and sincere; and the more earnest both are, the more painful does the situation become. If you and your son thought of religion merely from the conventional point of view, as the world does only too easily, you would meet on a common ground, and might pa.s.s through life without ever becoming aware of any gulf of separation, even though the hollowness of your several professions were of widely different kinds.

But as it happens, unfortunately for your peace (yet would you have it otherwise?), that you are both in earnest, both anxious to believe what is true and do what you believe to be right, you are likely to cause each other much suffering of a kind altogether unknown to less honorable and devoted natures. There are certain forms of suffering which affect only the tenderest and truest hearts; they have so many privileges, that this pain has been imposed upon them as the shadow of their suns.h.i.+ne.

Let me suggest, as some ground of consolation and of hope, that your very knowledge of the difference which pains you is in itself the evidence of a deeper unity. If your son has told you the full truth about the changes in his belief, it is probably because you yourself have educated him in the habit of truthfulness, which is as much a law of religion as it is of honor. Do you wish this part of his education to be enfeebled or obliterated? Could the Church herself reasonably or consistently blame him for practising the one virtue which, in a peaceful and luxurious society, demands a certain exercise of courage?

Our beliefs are independent of our will, but our honesty is not; and he who keeps his honesty keeps one of the most precious possessions of all true Christians and gentlemen. What state of society can be more repugnant to high religious feeling than a state of smooth external unanimity combined with the indifference of the heart, a state in which some splendid official religion performs its daily ceremonies as the costliest functionary of the Government, whilst the men of culture take a share in them out of conformity to the customs of society, without either the a.s.sent of the intellect or the emotion of the soul? All periods of great religious vitality have been marked by great and open diversity of belief; and to this day those countries where religion is most alive are the farthest removed from unanimity in the details of religious doctrine. If your son thinks these things of such importance to his conscience that he feels compelled to inflict upon you the slightest pain on their account, you may rest a.s.sured that his religious fibre is still full of vitality. If it were deadened, he would argue very much as follows. He would say: "These old doctrines of the Church are not of sufficient consequence for me to disturb my mother about them. What is the use of alluding to them ever?" And then you would have no anxiety; and he himself would have the feeling of settled peace which comes over a battle-field when the dead are buried out of sight. It is the peculiarity--some would say the evil, but I cannot think it an evil--of an age of great intellectual activity to produce an amount of critical inquiry into religious doctrine which is entirely unknown to times of simple tradition. And in these days the critical tendency has received a novel stimulus from the successive suggestions of scientific discovery. No one who, like your son, fully shares in the intellectual life of the times in which he lives, can live as if this criticism did not exist. If he affected to ignore it, as an objection already answered, there would be disingenuousness in the affectation. Fifty years ago, even twenty or thirty years ago, a highly intellectual young man might have hardened into the fixed convictions of middle age without any external disturbance, except such as might have been easily avoided.

The criticism existed then, in certain circles; but it was not in the air, as it is now. The life of mankind resembles that of a brook which has its times of tranquillity, but farther on its times of trouble and unrest. Our immediate forefathers had the peaceful time for their lot; those who went before them had pa.s.sed over very rough ground at the Reformation. For us, in our turn, comes the recurrent restlessness, though not in the same place. What we are going to, who can tell? What we suffer just now, you and many others know too accurately. There are gulfs of separation in homes of the most perfect love. Our only hope of preserving what is best in that purest of earthly felicities lies in the practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for opinions that are not ours, and a deep trust that the loyal pursuit of truth cannot but be in perfect accordance with the intentions of the Creator, who endowed the n.o.blest races of mankind with the indefatigable curiosity of science. Not to inquire was possible for our forefathers, but it is not possible for us. With our intellectual growth has come an irrepressible anxiety to possess the highest truth attainable by us.

This desire is not sinful, not presumptuous, but really one of the best and purest of our instincts, being nothing else than the sterling honesty of the intellect, seeking the harmony of concordant truth, and utterly disinterested.

I may quote, as an ill.u.s.tration of the tendencies prevalent amongst the n.o.blest and most cultivated young men, a letter from Lady Westmorland to Mr. Robert Lytton about her accomplished son, the now celebrated Julian Fane. "We had," she said, "several conversations, during his last illness, upon religious subjects, about which he had his own peculiar views. The disputes and animosities between High and Low Church, and all the feuds of religious sectarianism, caused him the deepest disgust. I think, indeed, that he carried this feeling too far. He had a horror of _cant_, which I also think was exaggerated; for it gave him a repulsion for all outward show of religious observances. He often told me that he never missed the practice of prayer, at morning and evening, and at other times. But his prayers were his own: his own thoughts in his own words. He said that he could not pray in the set words of another; nor unless he was _alone_. As to joining in family prayers, or praying at church, he found it impossible. He constantly read the New Testament. He deprecated the indiscriminate reading of the Bible. He firmly believed in the efficacy of sincere prayer; and was always pleased when I told him I had prayed for him."

To this it may be added, that many recent conversions to the Church of Rome, though apparently of an exactly opposite character, have in reality also been brought about by the scientific inquiries of the age.

The religious sentiment, alarmed at the prospect of a possible taking away of that which it feeds upon, has sought in many instances to preserve it permanently under the guardians.h.i.+p of the strongest ecclesiastical authority. In an age of less intellectual disturbance this anxiety would scarcely have been felt; and the degree of authority claimed by one of the reformed Churches would have been accepted as sufficient. Here again the agitations of the modern intellect have caused division in families; and as you are lamenting the heterodoxy of your son, so other parents regret the Roman orthodoxy of theirs.

LETTER IV.

TO THE SON OF THE LADY TO WHOM THE PRECEDING LETTER WAS ADDRESSED.

Difficulty of detaching intellectual from religious questions--The sacerdotal system--Necessary to ascertain what religion is--Intellectual religion really nothing but philosophy--The popular instinct--The test of belief--Public wors.h.i.+p--The intellect moral, but not religious--Intellectual activity sometimes in contradiction to dogma--Differences between the intellectual and religious lives.

Your request is not so simple as it appears. You ask me for a frank opinion as to the course your mind is taking in reference to very important subjects; but you desire only intellectual, and not religious guidance. The difficulty is to effect any clear demarcation between the two. Certainly I should never take upon myself to offer religious advice to any one; it is difficult for those who have not qualified themselves for the priestly office to do that with force and effect. The manner in which a priest leads and manages a mind that has from the first been moulded in the beliefs and observances of his Church, cannot be imitated by a layman. A priest starts always from authority; his method, which has been in use from the earliest ages, consists first in claiming your unquestioning a.s.sent to certain doctrines, from which he immediately proceeds to deduce the inferences that may affect your conduct or regulate your thoughts. It is a method perfectly adapted to its own ends. It can deal with all humanity, and produce the most immediate practical results. So long as the a.s.sent to the doctrines is sincere, the sacerdotal system may contend successfully against some of the strongest forms of evil; but when the a.s.sent to the doctrines has ceased to be complete, when some of them are half-believed and others not believed at all, the system loses much of its primitive efficiency. It seems likely that your difficulty, the difficulty of so many intellectual men in these days, is to know where the intellectual questions end and the purely religious ones can be considered to begin.

If you could once ascertain that, in a manner definitely satisfactory, you would take your religious questions to a clergyman and your intellectual ones to a man of science, and so get each solved independently.

Without presuming to offer a solution of so complex a difficulty as this, I may suggest to you that it is of some importance to your intellectual life to ascertain what religion is. A book was published many years ago by a very learned author, in which he endeavored to show that what is vulgarly called scepticism may be intellectual religion.

Now, although nothing can be more distasteful to persons of culture than the bigotry which refuses the name of religion to other people's opinions, merely because they are other people's opinions, I suspect that the popular instinct is right in denying the name of religion to the inferences of the intellect. The description which the author just alluded to gave of what he called intellectual religion was in fact simply a description of philosophy, and of that discipline which the best philosophy imposes upon the heart and the pa.s.sions. On the other hand, Dr. Arnold, when he says that by religion he always understands Christianity, narrows the word as much as he would have narrowed the word "patriotism" had he defined it to mean a devotion to the interests of England. I think the popular instinct, though of course quite unable to construct a definition of religion, is in its vague way very well aware of the peculiar nature of religious thought and feeling. The popular instinct would certainly never confound religion with philosophy on the one hand, nor, on the other, unless excited to opposition, would it be likely to refuse the name of religion to another wors.h.i.+p, such as Mahometanism, for instance.

According to the popular instinct, then, which on a subject of this kind appears the safest of all guides, a religion involves first a belief and next a public practice. The nature of the belief is in these days wholly peculiar to religion; in other times it was not so, because then people believed other things much in the same way. But in these days the test of religious belief is that it should make men accept as certain truth what they would disbelieve on any other authority. For example, a true Roman Catholic believes that the consecrated host is the body of Christ, and so long as he lives in the purely religious spirit he continues to believe this; but so soon as the power of his religious sentiment declines he ceases to believe it, and the wafer appears to him a wafer, and no more. And so amongst Protestants the truly religious believe many things which no person not being under the authority of religion could by any effort bring himself to believe. It is easy, for example, to believe that Joshua arrested the sun's apparent motion, so long as the religious authority of the Bible remains perfectly intact; but no sooner does the reader become critical than the miracle is disbelieved. In all ages, and in all countries, religions have narrated marvellous things, and the people have always affirmed that not to believe these narratives const.i.tuted the absence of religion, or what they called atheism. They have equally, in all ages and countries, held the public act of partic.i.p.ation in religious wors.h.i.+p to be an essential part of what they called religion. They do not admit the sufficiency of secret prayer.

Can these popular instincts help us to a definition? They may help us at least to mark the dividing line between religion and morality, between religion and philosophy. No one has ever desired, more earnestly and eagerly than I, to discover the foundations of the intellectual religion; no one has ever felt more chilling disappointment in the perception of the plain bare fact that the intellect gives morality, philosophy, precious things indeed, but not religion. It is like seeking art by science. Thousands of artists, whole schools from generation to generation, have sought fine art through anatomy and perspective; and although these sciences did not hinder the born artists from coming to art at last, they did not ensure their safe arrival in the art-paradise; in many instances they even led men away from art. So it is with the great modern search for the intellectual religion; the idea of it is scientific in its source, and the result of it, the last definite attainment, is simply intellectual morality, not religion in the sense which all humanity has attached to religion during all the ages that have preceded ours. We may say that philosophy is the religion of the intellectual; and if we go scrupulously to Latin derivations, it is so.

But taking frankly the received meaning of the word as it is used by mankind everywhere, we must admit that, although high intellect would lead us inevitably to high and pure morality, and to most scrupulously beautiful conduct in everything, towards men, towards women, towards even the lower and lowest animals, still it does not lead us to that belief in the otherwise unbelievable, or to that detailed _cultus_ which is meant by religion in the universally accepted sense. It is disingenuous to take a word popularly respected and attribute to it another sense. Such a course is not strictly honest, and therefore not purely intellectual; for the foundation of the intellectual life is honesty.

The difficulty of the intellectual life is, that whilst it can never a.s.sume a position of hostility to religion, which it must always recognize as the greatest natural force for the amelioration of mankind, it is nevertheless compelled to enunciate truths which may happen to be in contradiction with dogmas received at this or that particular time.

That you may not suspect me of a disposition to dwell continually on safe generalities and to avoid details out of timidity, let me mention two cases on which the intellectual and scientific find themselves at variance with the clergy. The clergy tell us that mankind descend from a single pair, and that in the earlier ages the human race attained a longevity counted not by decades but by centuries. Alexander Humboldt disbelieves the first of these propositions, Professor Owen disbelieves the second. Men of science generally are of the same opinion. Few men of science accept Adam and Eve, few accept Methuselah. Professor Owen argues that, since the oldest skeletons known have the same system of teething that we have, man can never have lived long enough to require nine sets of teeth. In regard to these, and a hundred other points on which science advances new views, the question which concerns us is how we are to maintain the integrity of the intellectual life. The danger is the loss of inward ingenuousness, the attempt to persuade ourselves that we believe opposite statements. If once we admit disingenuousness into the mind, the intellectual life is no longer serene and pure. The plain course for the preservation of our honesty, which is the basis of truly intellectual thinking, is to receive the truth, whether agreeable or the contrary, with all its train of consequences, however repulsive or discouraging. In attempting to reconcile scientific truth with the oldest traditions of humanity, there is but one serious danger, the loss of intellectual integrity. Of that possession modern society has little left to lose.

But let us understand that the intellectual life and the religious life are as distinct as the scientific and the artistic lives. They may be led by the same person, but by the same person in different moods. They coincide on some points, accidentally. Certainly, the basis of high thinking is perfect honesty, and honesty is a recognized religious virtue. Where the two minds differ is on the importance of authority.

The religious life is based upon authority, the intellectual life is based upon personal investigation. From the intellectual point of view I cannot advise you to restrain the spirit of investigation, which is the scientific spirit. It may lead you very far, yet always to truth, ultimately,--you, or those after you, whose path you may be destined to prepare. Science requires a certain inward heat and heroism in her votaries, notwithstanding the apparent coldness of her statements.

Especially does she require that intellectual fearlessness which accepts a proved fact without reference to its personal or its social consequences.

LETTER V.

TO A FRIEND WHO SEEMED TO TAKE CREDIT TO HIMSELF, INTELLECTUALLY, FROM THE NATURE OF HIS RELIGIOUS BELIEF.

Anecdote of a Swiss gentleman--Religious belief protects traditions, but does not weaken the critical faculty itself--Ill.u.s.tration from the art of etching--Sydney Smith--Dr. Arnold--Earnest religious belief of Ampere--Comte and Sainte-Beuve--Faraday--Belief or unbelief proves nothing for or against intellectual capacity.

I happened once to be travelling in Switzerland with an eminent citizen of that country, and I remember how in speaking of some place we pa.s.sed through he a.s.sociated together the ideas of Protestantism and intellectual superiority in some such phrase as this: "The people here are very superior; they are Protestants." There seemed to exist, in my companion's mind, an a.s.sumption that Protestants would be superior people intellectually, or that superior people would be Protestants; and this set me thinking whether, in the course of such experience as had fallen in my way, I had found that religious creed had made much difference in the matter of intellectual ac.u.men or culture.

The exact truth appears to be this. A religious belief protects this or that subject against intellectual action, but it does not affect the energy of the intellectual action upon subjects which are not so protected. Let me ill.u.s.trate this by a reference to one of the fine arts, the art of etching. The etcher protects a copper-plate by means of a waxy covering called etching-ground, and wherever this ground is removed the acid bites the copper. The waxy ground does not in the least affect the strength of the acid, it only intervenes between it and the metal plate. So it is in the mind of man with regard to his intellectual ac.u.men and his religious creed. The creed may protect a tradition from the operation of the critical faculty, but it does not weaken the critical faculty itself. In the English Church, for example, the Bible is protected against criticism; but this does not weaken the critical faculty of English clergymen with reference to other literature, and many of them give evidence of a strong critical faculty in all matters not protected by their creed. Think of the vigorous common sense of Sydney Smith, exposing so many abuses at a time when it needed not only much courage but great originality to expose them! Remember the intellectual force of Arnold, a great natural force if ever there was one--so direct in action, so independent of contemporary opinion!

Intellectual forces of this kind act freely not only in the Church of England, but in other Churches, even in the Church of Rome. Who amongst the scientific men of this century has been more profoundly scientific, more capable of original scientific discovery than Ampere? Yet Ampere was a Roman Catholic, and not a Roman Catholic in the conventional sense merely, like the majority of educated Frenchmen, but a hearty and enthusiastic believer in the doctrines of the Church of Rome. The belief in transubstantiation did not prevent Ampere from becoming one of the best chemists of his time, just as the belief in the plenary inspiration of the New Testament does not prevent a good Protestant from becoming an acute critic of Greek literature generally. A man may have the finest scientific faculty, the most advanced scientific culture, and still believe the consecrated wafer to the body of Jesus Christ. For since he still believes it to be the body of Christ under the apparent form of a wafer, it is evident that the wafer under chemical a.n.a.lysis would resolve itself into the same elements as before consecration; therefore why consult chemistry? What has chemistry to say to a mystery of this kind, the essence of which is the _complete_ disguise of a human body under a form in _all_ respects answering the material semblance of a wafer? Ampere must have foreseen the certain results of a.n.a.lysis as clearly as the best chemist educated in the principles of Protestantism, but this did not prevent him from adoring the consecrated host in all the sincerity of his heart.

I say that it does not follow, because M. or N. happens to be a Protestant, that he is intellectually superior to Ampere, or because M.

or N. happens to be a Unitarian, or a Deist, or a Positivist, that he is intellectually superior to Dr. Arnold or Sydney Smith. And on the other side of this question it is equally unfair to conclude that because a man does not share whatever may be our theological beliefs on the positive side, he must be less capable intellectually than we are. Two of the finest and most disciplined modern intellects, Comte and Sainte-Beuve, were neither Catholics, nor Protestants, nor Deists, but convinced atheists; yet Comte until the period of his decline, and Sainte-Beuve up to the very hour of his death, were quite in the highest rank of modern scientific and literary intellect.

The inference from these facts which concerns every one of us is, that we are not to build up any edifice of intellectual self-satisfaction on the ground that in theological matters we believe or disbelieve this thing or that. If Ampere believed the doctrines of the Church of Rome, which to us seem so incredible, if Faraday remained throughout his brilliant intellectual career (certainly one of the most brilliant ever lived through by a human being) a sincere member of the obscure sect of the Sandemanians, we are not warranted in the conclusion that we are intellectually their betters because our theology is more novel, or more fas.h.i.+onable, or more in harmony with reason. Nor, on the other hand, does our orthodoxy prove anything in favor of our mental force and culture. Who, amongst the most orthodox writers, has a more forcible and cultivated intellect than Sainte-Beuve?--who can better give us the tone of perfect culture, with its love of justice, its thoroughness in preparation, its superiority to all crudeness and violence? Anglican or Romanist, dissenter or heretic, may be our master in the intellectual sphere, from which no sincere and capable laborer is excluded, either by his belief or by his unbelief.

LETTER VI.

TO A ROMAN CATHOLIC FRIEND WHO ACCUSED THE INTELLECTUAL CLa.s.s OF A WANT OF REVERENCE FOR AUTHORITY.

Necessity for treating affirmations as if they were doubtful--The Papal Infallibility--The Infallibility of the Sacred Scriptures--Opposition of method between Intellect and Faith--The perfection of the intellectual life requires intellectual methods--Inevitable action of the intellectual forces.

It is very much the custom, in modern writing about liberty of thought, to pa.s.s lightly over the central difficulty, which sooner or later will have to be considered. The difficulty is this, that the freedom of the intellectual life can never be secured except by treating as if they were doubtful several affirmations which large ma.s.ses of mankind hold to be certainties as indisputable as the facts of science. One of the most recently conspicuous of these affirmations is the infallibility of the Pope of Rome. Nothing can be more certain in the opinion of immense numbers of Roman Catholics than the infallible authority of the Supreme Pontiff on all matters affecting doctrine. But then the matters affecting doctrine include many subjects which come within the circle of the sciences. History is one of those subjects which modern intellectual criticism takes leave to study after its own methods, and yet certain prevalent views of history are offensive to the Pope and explicitly condemned by him. The consequence is, that in order to study history with mental liberty, we have to act practically as if there existed a doubt of the Papal infallibility. The same difficulty occurs with reference to the great Protestant doctrine which attributes a similar infallibility to the various authors who composed what are now known to us as the Holy Scriptures. Our men of science act, and the laws of scientific investigation compel them to act, as if it were not quite certain that the views of scientific subjects held by those early writers were so final as to render modern investigation superfluous. It is useless to disguise the fact that there is a real opposition of method between intellect and faith, and that the independence of the intellectual life can never be fully secured unless all affirmations based upon authority are treated as if they were doubtful. This implies no change of manner in the intellectual cla.s.ses towards those cla.s.ses whose mental habits are founded upon obedience. I mean that the man of science does not treat the affirmations of any priesthood with less respect than the affirmations of his own scientific brethren; he applies with perfect impartiality the same criticism to all affirmations, from whatever source they emanate. The intellect does not recognize authority in any one, and intellectual men do not treat the Pope, or the author of Genesis, with less consideration than those famous persons who in their day have been the brightest luminaries of science. The difficulty, however, remains, that whilst the intellectual cla.s.s has no wish to offend either those who believe in the infallibility of the Pope, or those who believe in the infallibility of the author of Genesis, it is compelled to conduct its own investigations as if those infallibilities were matters of doubt and not of certainty.

Why this is so, may be shown by a reference to the operation of Nature in other ways. The rewards of physical strength and health are not given to the most moral, to the most humane, to the most gentle, but to those who have acted, and whose forefathers have acted, in the most perfect accordance with the laws of their physical const.i.tution. So the perfection of the intellectual life is not given to the most humble, the most believing, the most obedient, but to those who use their minds according to the most purely intellectual methods. One of the most important truths that human beings can know is the perfectly independent working of the natural laws: one of the best practical conclusions to be drawn from the observation of Nature is that in the conduct of our own understandings we should use a like independence.

It would be wrong, in writing to you on subjects so important as these, to shrink from handling the real difficulties. Every one now is aware that science must and will pursue her own methods and work according to her own laws, without concerning herself with the most authoritative affirmations from without. But if science said one thing and authoritative tradition said another, no perfectly ingenuous person could rest contented until he had either reconciled the two or decidedly rejected one of them. It is impossible for a mind which is honest towards itself to admit that a proposition is true and false at the same time, true in science and false in theology. Therefore, although the intellectual methods are entirely independent of tradition, it may easily happen that the indirect results of our following those methods may be the overthrow of some dogma which has for many generations been considered indispensable to man's spiritual welfare. With regard to this contingency it need only be observed that the intellectual forces of humanity must act, like floods and winds, according to their own laws; and that if they cast down any edifice too weak to resist them, it must be because the original constructors had not built it substantially, or because those placed in charge of it had neglected to keep it in repair.

This is their business, not ours. Our work is simply to ascertain truth by our own independent methods, alike without hostility to any persons claiming authority, and without deference to them.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] The t.i.tle of this letter seems so odd, that it may be necessary to inform the reader that it was addressed to a real person.

[7] I had desired to say something about the uses of tradition in the industrial arts and in the fine arts, but the subject is a very large one, and I have not time or s.p.a.ce to treat it properly here. I may observe, however, briefly, that the genuine spirit of tradition has almost entirely disappeared from English industry and art, where it has been replaced by a spirit of scientific investigation and experiment. The true traditional spirit was still in full vigor in j.a.pan a few years ago, and it kept the industry and art of that country up to a remarkably high standard. The traditional spirit is most favorable to professional skill, because, under its influence, the apprentice learns thoroughly, whereas under other influences he often learns very imperfectly. The inferiority of English painting to French (considered technically) has been due to the prevalence of a traditional spirit in the French school which was almost entirely absent from our own.

PART VII.

_WOMEN AND MARRIAGE._

LETTER I.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN OF INTELLECTUAL TASTES, WHO, WITHOUT HAVING AS YET ANY PARTICULAR LADY IN VIEW, HAD EXPRESSED, IN A GENERAL WAY, HIS DETERMINATION TO GET MARRIED.

How ignorant we all are about marriage--People wrong in their estimates of the marriages of others--Effects of marriage on the intellectual life--Two courses open--A wife who would not interfere with elevated pursuits--A wife capable of understanding them--Madame Ingres--Difference in the education of the s.e.xes--Difficulty of educating a wife.

The subject of marriage is one concerning which neither I nor anybody else can have more than an infinitesimally small atom of knowledge. Each of us knows how his or her own marriage has turned out; but that, in comparison with a knowledge of marriage generally, is like a single plant in comparison with the flora of the globe. The utmost experience on this subject to be found in this country extends to about three trials or experiments. A man may become twice a widower, and then marry a third time, but it may be easily shown that the variety of his experience is more than counterbalanced by its incompleteness in each instance. For the experiment to be conclusive even as to the wisdom of one decision, it must extend over half a lifetime. A true marriage is not a mere temporary arrangement, and although a young couple are said to be married as soon as the lady has changed her name, the truth is that the real marriage is a long slow intergrowth, like that of two trees planted quite close together in the forest.

The subject of marriage generally is one of which men know less than they know of any other subject of universal interest. People are almost always wrong in their estimates of the marriages of others, and the best proof how little we know the real tastes and needs of those with whom we have been most intimate, is our unfailing surprise at the marriages they make. Very old and experienced people fancy they know a great deal about younger couples, but their guesses, there is good reason to believe, never _exactly_ hit the mark.

Ever since this idea, that marriage is a subject we are all very ignorant about, had taken root in my own mind, many little incidents were perpetually occurring to confirm it; they proved to me, on the one hand, how often I had been mistaken about other people, and, on the other hand, how mistaken other people were concerning the only marriage I profess to know anything about, namely, my own.

Our ignorance is all the darker that few men tell us the little that they know, that little being too closely bound up with that innermost privacy of life which every man of right feeling respects in his own case, as in the case of another. The only instances which are laid bare to the public view are the unhappy marriages, which are really not marriages at all. An unhappy alliance bears exactly the same relation to a true marriage that disease does to health, and the quarrels and misery of it are the crises by which Nature tries to bring about either the recovery of happiness, or the endurable peace of a settled separation.

All that we really know about marriage is that it is based upon the most powerful of all our instincts, and that it shows its own justification in its fruits, especially in the prolonged and watchful care of children. But marriage is very complex in its effects, and there is one set of effects, resulting from it, to which remarkably little attention has been paid hitherto,--I mean its effects upon the intellectual life.