Phaethon: Loose Thoughts For Loose Thinkers Part 9

"But, I say, these books have made me a better man."

"I do not doubt it. An earnest cultivated man, speaking his whole mind to an earnest cultivated man, will hardly fail of telling him something he did not know before. But if you had not been a cultivated man, Templeton, a man with few sorrows, and few trials, and few unsatisfied desires-if you had been the village shopkeeper, with his bad debts, and his temptations to make those who can pay for those who cannot,-if you had been one of your own labourers, environed with the struggle for daily bread, and the alehouse, and hungry children, and a sick wife, and a dull taste, and a duller head-in short, if you had been a man such as nine out of ten are- what would his school have taught you then? You want some truths which are common to men as men, which will help and teach them, let their temperament or their circ.u.mstances be what they will-do you not? If you do not, your complaint of Lady Jane's exclusive Creed is a mere selfish compet.i.tion on your part, between a Creed which will fit her peculiarities, and a Creed which will fit your peculiarities. Do you not see that?"

"I do-go on."

"Then I say you will not find that in Professor Windrush's school.

I say you will find it in Lady Jane's Creed."

"What? In the very Creed which excludes me?"

"Whether that Creed excludes you or not is a question of the true meaning of its words. And that again is a question of Dialectics.

I say it includes you and all mankind."

"You must mistake her doctrines, then."

"I do not, I a.s.sure you. I know what they are; and I know, also, the misreading of them to which your dear mother's school has accustomed her, and which has taught her that these Creeds only belong to the few who have discovered their own share in them. But whether the Creeds really do that or not-whether Lady Jane does not implicitly confess that they do not by her own words and deeds of every day, that, I say, is a question of Dialectics, in the Platonic sense of that word, as the science which discovers the true and false in thought, by discovering the true and false concerning the meanings of words, which represent thought."

"Be it so. I should be glad to hold what Jane holds, for the sake of the marvellous practical effect on her character-sweet creature that she is!-which it has produced in the last seven years."

"And which effect, I presume, was not increased by her denying to you any share in the same?"

"Alas, no! It is only when she falls on that-when she begins denouncing and excluding-that all the old faults, few and light as they are, seem to leap into ugly life again for the moment."

"Few and light, indeed! Ah, my dear Templeton, the gulf between you and happiness looks wide; but only because it is magnified in mist."

"Which you would have me disperse by lightning-flashes of Dialectics, eh? Well, every man has his nostrum."

"I have not. My method is not my own, but Plato's."

"But, my good fellow, the Windrush school admire Plato as much as you do, and yet certainly arrive at somewhat different conclusions."

"They do Plato the honour of patronising him, as a Representative Man; but their real text-book, you will find, is Proclus. That hapless philosophaster's a priori method, even his very verbiage, is dear to their souls; for they copy it through wet and dry, through sense and nonsense. But as for Plato-when I find them using Plato's weapons, I shall believe in their understanding and love of him."

"And in the meanwhile claim him as a new verger for the Reformed Church Catholic?"

"Not a new verger, Templeton. Augustine said, fourteen hundred years ago, that Socrates was the philosopher of the Catholic Faith.

If he has not seemed so of late years, it is, I suspect, because we do not understand quite the same thing as Augustine did, when we talk of the Catholic Faith and Christianity."

"But you forget, in your hurry of clerical confidence, that the question still remains, whether these Creeds are true."

"That, too, as I take it, is a question of Dialectics, unless you choose to reduce the whole to a balance-of-probabilities argument- rather too narrow a basis for a World-faith to stand upon. Try all 'mythic' theories, Straussite and others, by honest Dialectics. Try your own thoughts and experiences, and the accredited thoughts and experiences of wise men, by the same method. Mesmerism and 'The Development of Species' may wait till they have settled themselves somewhat more into sciences; at present it does not much matter what agrees or disagrees with them. But using this weapon fearlessly and honestly, you will, unless Socrates and Plato were fools, arrive at absolute eternal truths, which are equally true for all men, good or bad, conscious or unconscious; and I tell you-of course you need not believe me till you have made trial-that those truths will coincide with the plain honest meaning of the Catholic Creeds, as determined by the same method-the only one, indeed, by which they or anything else can be determined."

"You forget Baconian induction, of which you are so fond."

"And pray what are Dialectics, but strict Baconian induction applied to words, as the phenomena of mind, instead of to things, the phenomena of-"

"What?"

"I can't tell you; or, rather, I will not. I have my own opinion about what those trees and stones are; but it will require a few years' more verification before I tell."

"Really, you and your Dialectics seem in a hopeful and valiant state of mind."

"Why not? Can truth do anything but conquer?"

"Of course-a.s.suming, as every one does, that the truth is with you."

"My dear fellow, I have seldom met a man who could not be a far better dialectician than I shall ever be, if he would but use his Common Sense."

"Common Sense? That really sounds something like a bathos, after the great big Greek word which you have been propounding to me as the cure for all my doubts."

"What? Are you about to 'gib' after all, just as I was flattering myself that I had broken you in to go quietly in harness?"

"I am very much minded to do so. The truth is, I cannot bring myself to believe that the universal panacea lies in an obscure and ancient scientific method."

"Obscure and ancient? Did I not just say that any man might be a dialectician? Did Socrates ever appeal to any faculty but the Common Sense of man as man, which exists just as much in England now, I presume, as it did in Athens in his day? Does he not, in pursuance of that method of his, draw his arguments and ill.u.s.trations, to the horror of the big-worded Sophists, from dogs, kettles, fishwives, and what not which is vulgar and commonplace?

Or did I, in my clumsy attempt to imitate him, make use of a single argument which does not lie, developed or undeveloped, in the Common Sense of every clown; in that human Reason of his, which is part of G.o.d's image in him, and in every man? And has not my complaint against Mr. Windrush's school been, that they will not do this; that they will not accept the ground which is common to men as men, but disregard that part of the 'Vox Populi' which is truly 'Vox Dei,'

for that which is 'Vox Diaboli'-for private sentiments, fancies, and aspirations; and so casting away the common sense of mankind, build up each man, on the pin's point of his own private judgment, his own inverted pyramid?"

"But are you not asking me to do just the same, when you propose to me to start as a Scientific Dialectician?"

"Why, what are Dialectics, or any other scientific method, but conscious common sense? And what is common sense, but unconscious scientific method? Every man is a dialectician, be he scholar or boor, in as far as he tries to use no words which he does not understand, and to sift his own thoughts, and his expression of them, by that Reason which is at once common to men, and independent of them."

"As M. Jourdain talked prose all his life without knowing it. Well- I prefer the unconscious method. I have as little faith as Mr.

Carlyle would have in saying: 'Go to, let us make'-an induction about words, or anything else. It seems to me no very hopeful method of finding out facts as they are."

"Certainly; provided you mean any particular induction, and not a general inductive and severely-inquiring habit of mind; that very 'Go to' being a fair sign that you have settled beforehand what the induction shall be; in plain English, that you have come to your conclusion already, and are now looking about for facts to prove it.

But is it any wiser to say: 'Go to, I will be conscious of being unconscious of being conscious of my own forms of thought'? For that is what you do say, when, having read Plato, and knowing his method, and its coincidence with Common Sense, you determine to ignore it on common-sense questions."

"But why not ignore it, if mother-wit does as well?"

"Because you cannot ignore it. You have learnt it more or less, and cannot forget it, try as you will, and must either follow it, or break it and talk nonsense. And moreover, you ought not to ignore it. For it seems to me, that you were sent to Cambridge by One greater than, your parents, in order that you might learn it, and bring it home hither for the use of the M. Jourdains round you here, who have no doubt been talking prose all their life, but may have been also talking it very badly."

"You speak riddles."

"My dear fellow, may not a man employ Reason, or any other common human faculty, all his life, and yet employ them very clumsily and defectively?"

"I should say so, from the gross amount of human unwisdom."

"And that, in the case of uneducated persons, happens because they are not conscious of those faculties, or of their right laws, but use them blindly and capriciously, by fits and starts, talking sense on one point and nonsense on another?"

"Too true, Heaven knows."

"But the educated man, if education mean anything, is the man who has become conscious of those common human faculties and their laws, and has learnt to use them continuously and accurately, on all matters alike."

"True, O Socraticule!"

"Then is it not his especial business to teach the right use of them to the less educated?-unless you agree with the old Sophists, that the purpose of education is to enable us to deceive or coerce the uneducated for our own aggrandis.e.m.e.nt."

"I am therefore, it seems, to get up Platonic Dialectics simply in order to teach my ploughmen to use their common sense?"