Mean but themselves, each fittest to create
And to repay the other. Why rejoices
Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good?
Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner’s hood,
Why waste thy sighs and thy lamenting voices,
Image of image, ghost of ghostly elf,
That such a thing as thou feel’st warm or cold?
Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold
These costless shadows of thy shadowy self?
Be sad! be glad! be neither! seek, or shun!
Thou hast no reason why! Thou canst have none,
Thy being’s being is contradiction.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
I have never found any great difficulty in believing that “our laughter and our tears mean but themselves.” Nor, having formulated it, do I find the belief particularly depressing.
No doubt, it is because I am not depressed that I believe. Most of philosophy begins with a feeling or an idiosyncrasy of temperament, and ends in a concept. Thus, men desire immortality and, having desired, set out to prove that they desire something real. The fact that they desire it is even used as an argument in favour of the existence of the object of desire. It is, indeed, the argument of the philosophers of immortality. Not, alas, a very cogent argument, except for those who already accept the conclusion, to which it is supposed to lead.
Reason, an Ignis Fatuus in the mind,
Which, leaving light of nature, sense, behind,
Pathless and dangerous wandering ways it takes
Through error’s fenny bogs and thorny brakes,
Whilst the misguided follower climbs in vain
Mountains of whimsies heaped in his own brain;
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down
Into doubt’s boundless sea, where, like to drown,
Books bear him up a while and make him try
To swim with bladders of philosophy,
In hopes still to o’ertake the skipping light.
The vapour dances in his dazzling sight,
Till, spent, it leaves him to eternal night.
Then old age and experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death, and make him understand,
After a search so painful and so long,
That all his life he had been in the wrong;
Huddled in dirt, the reasoning engine lies,
Who was so proud, so witty and so wise.
JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER.
The sun and stars that float in the open air;
The apple-shaped earth and we upon it—surely the drift of them is something grand!
I do not know what it is, except that it is grand, and that it is happiness,
And that the enclosing purport of us here is not a speculation, or bon mot, or reconnaissance.
And that it is not something which by luck may turn out well for us, and without luck must be a failure for us,
And not something which may yet be retracted in a certain contingency.
WALT WHITMAN.
Reason emerges scatheless from Rochester’s attack, which is directed in reality only against man’s habit of reasoning on inadequate data. Reason is an instrument, which like any other instrument can be used well or ill. (The better the instrument, the more damage it can do when badly handled. A sharp saw will cut fingers as efficiently as it will cut wood.) If the reasoner starts from well-established premisses, he will reach conclusions in which he may have confidence. If he starts from premisses which are false, reason will take him into “error’s fenny bogs and thorny brakes.” Moral: make sure by experiment and observation that your premisses are correct.
Where life in general is concerned, it is impossible to have adequate data. All that the individual reasoner has by way of data is his own individual experience and his own feeling about that experience. (Incidentally, he may, in the course of his life, have many and contradictory feelings about his experience; but we will suppose, for the sake of argument, that one feeling predominates.) The feeling he has about his own experience is the reasoner’s major premiss. Or rather, since it is impossible to base an argument on a feeling, it is the rationalization of that feeling in terms of a concept, which serves as the major premiss.
We rationalize our feelings easily, almost automatically. The process is so natural to us, that we seldom realize how unjustifiably we resort to it. If I wake up on a fine summer morning, feeling exceptionally well and high spirited, it does not follow that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. But it is precisely on such rationalizations of feelings that theologies are founded, and it is from such rationalizations that reason leads men, by inexorable logic, into those quagmires of error, over those mountains of whimsies, which Rochester has described. Whitman gives us, in the raw, so to speak, his feeling about experience—a feeling which might easily be rationalized into the major premiss of a theology. Rendered thus, the emotion seems vague enough, in all conscience. But, however vague, it is all we are given. The elaborate constructions of theology are based, as Otto has insisted, on the rationalizations of just such dim and hardly describable “numinous” feelings. Any system of clear-cut concepts based upon data so obscure and inadequate can hardly fail to be incorrect.
If we would avoid the fenny bogs and thorny brakes, we must imitate the self-denying Whitman and refrain from arbitrary rationalizations and headlong rushes to logical conclusions. Or if we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe. People will accept certain theological statements about life and the world, will elect to perform certain rites and to follow certain rules of conduct, not because they imagine the statements to be true or the rules and rites to be divinely dictated, but simply because they have discovered experimentally that to live in a certain ritual rhythm, under certain ethical restraints, and as if certain metaphysical doctrines were true, is to live nobly, with style. Every art has its conventions which every artist must accept. The greatest, the most important of the arts is living.
INDEX OF AUTHORS QUOTED
Anonymous, 73, 94, 100, 117, 190, 191, 192, 194, 236
Archpoet, The, 84
Arnold, Matthew, 44, 51, 118, 151, 158, 268, 301, 306, 312, 313
Ausonius, 158
Bagehot, Walter, 68
Bastard, Thomas, 146, 168
Baudelaire, Charles, 14, 29, 42, 91, 151, 154, 219, 274, 313
Beaumont, Francis, 291
Beaumont and Fletcher, 74
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 187, 189
Benlowes, Edward, 88, 222
Biran, Maine de, 271
Blake, William, 44, 52, 57, 86, 105, 115, 127, 132, 265
Brome, Alexander, 177
Brontë, Charlotte, 290, 291
Brontë, Emily, 17, 308
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 294
Browning, Robert, 103, 214, 216, 259
Burns, Robert, 128
Byron, Lord, 36
Campion, Thomas, 96
Carew, Thomas, 102, 106, 137, 199
Cartwright, William, 95
Chapman, George, 283
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 70, 86, 139, 254, 282
Cleveland, John, 196
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 176
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 9, 25, 26, 60, 149, 165, 169, 261, 314
Conway, M. D., 22
Cotton, Charles, 193, 201, 212, 240, 279
Cowley, Abraham, 120, 203, 256
Crashaw, Richard, 112, 246, 255
Daniel, Samuel, 68
Dante Alighieri, 1, 97, 162, 235, 264
Darley, George, 98, 237, 288
Davies, W. H., 233
Defoe, Daniel, 164, 165
Donne, John, 95, 120, 123, 125, 127, 232
Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of, 184, 224
Drayton, Michael, 119, 172, 263
Drummond, William, 305
Dryden, John, 140, 255
Egyptian Poem, 307
Elliott, Ebenezer, 207
Epicurus, 308
Fletcher, John, 72, 94
Gascoigne, George, 299
Gautier, Théophile, 103
Gombauld, Jean Ogier de, 92, 271
Greene, Robert, 179
Gregory the Great, 298
Greville, Fulke, 69
Griffin, Bartholomew, 73, 222
Hall, John, 188
Harington, Sir John, 73
Herbert, George, 12, 16, 89, 137, 164, 226, 276, 285
Herrick, Robert, 245
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 24, 25, 26, 34, 44, 68, 291
Hunt, Leigh, 63
Johnson, Lionel, 32
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 224
Jonson, Ben, 116, 148
Keats, John, 38, 142, 174, 180, 280, 300
Kierkegaard, Sören, 159, 287
King, Henry, 138
Lisle, Samuel, 193
Lovelace, Richard, 201
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 58, 116, 159, 234, 295
Marlowe, Christopher, 75, 76, 221, 263
Marvell, Andrew, 26, 33, 95, 122, 124, 202
Marx, Karl, 300
Medici, Giuliano de, 310
Melville, Herman, 34
Middleton, Thomas, 74
Milton, John, 18, 78, 103, 121, 131, 151, 196, 245, 254, 258, 303
Nashe, Thomas, 147, 149
Nerval, Gerard de, 238
Noel, Henry, 239
Notker Balbulus, 227
Orphic Formula, 227
Pascal, Blaise, 271, 272, 287
Patmore, Coventry, 22, 31, 79, 163, 314
Peele, George, 72, 75, 229, 230
Petronius Arbiter, 116, 162
Plato, 294
Plutarch, 156
Poe, Edgar Allan, 241
Pope, Alexander, 220
Prudentius, 218
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 95, 186
Rimbaud, Arthur, 33, 87, 174, 184, 210, 283
Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 121, 187, 204, 316
Sappho, 99
Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, Earl of, 80
Shakespeare, William, 56, 97, 101, 138, 249, 250
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 9, 29, 109, 128, 130, 182, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 265, 294, 295, 297
Sidney, Sir Philip, 309
Sophocles, 156
Spells, 228
St. John of the Cross, 111
Strode, William, 245
Suckling, Sir John, 54
Tailhade, Laurent, 208
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 63, 86, 100, 159, 232
Thomas, Edward, 27, 166
Valéry, Paul, 15
Vaughan, Henry, 12, 14, 24, 267, 268, 277, 286, 314
Virgil, 108
Wever, R., 73
Whitman, Walt, 65, 263, 280, 297, 298, 317
Wordsworth, William, 9, 30, 61, 160, 209, 210
Wyat, Sir Thomas, 100
The end
