"To a man," I said, "to whom books are people, and the livest kind of people, brothers of his own flesh, cronies of his life, the whole business of getting a book in a library is full of resentment and rebellion. He finds his rights, or what he thinks are his rights, being treated as privileges, his most sacred and confidential relations, his relations with the great, meddled with by strangers—pleasant enough strangers, but still strangers. Perhaps he wishes to see John Milton. He goes down town to a great unhomelike-looking building, and slides in at the door. He steps up to a wall, and asks permission to see John Milton. He waits in a kind of vague, unsatisfied fashion, but he feels that machinery is being set in motion. While it is being set in motion, he sits down before the wall on one of the seats or pews where a large audience of other comfortless and lonely-looking people are. He feels the great, heartless building gathering itself together, going after John Milton for him, while he sits and waits. One after the other he hears human beings' names being called out in space, and one by one poor scared-looking people who seem to be ashamed to go with their names—most of them—step up before the audience. He sees a book being swung out to them, watches them slink gratefully away, and finally his own name echoing about among the Immortals, startles its way down to him. Then he steps up to the wall again, and John Milton at last, as on some huge transcendental derrick belonging to the city of ——, is swung into his arms. He feels of the outside gropingly—takes it home. If he can get John Milton to come to life again after all this, he communes with him. In two weeks he takes him back. Then the derrick again."

The only kind of book that I ever feel close to, in the average library, is a book on war. Even if I go in, in a gentle, harmless, happy, singing sort of way, thinking I want a volume of pastoral poems, by the time I get it, I wish it were something that could be loaded, or that would go off. As for asking for a book and reading it in cold blood right in the middle of such a place, it will always be beyond me. I have never found a book I could do it with yet. However I struggle to follow the train of thought in it, it's a fuse. I find myself breaking out, when I see all these far-away-looking people coming up in rows to their faraway books. "A library," I say to myself, "is a huge barbaric, mediaeval institution, where behind stone and glass a man's dearest friends in the world, the familiars of his life, lie helpless in their cells. It is the Penitentiary of Immortals. There are certain visiting days when friends and relatives are allowed to come, but it only—" At this point a gong sounds and tells me to go home. "Are not books bone of a man's bone, and flesh of his flesh? Oughtn't they to be? Shall a man ask permission to see his wife? Why should I fill out a slip to a pretty girl, when I want to be in Greece with Homer, or go to hell with Dante? Why should I write on a piece of paper, 'I promise to return—infinity—by six o'clock'? A library is a huge machine for keeping the letter with books and violating their spirit. The fact that the machinery is filled with a mirage of pleasant faces does not help. Pleasant faces make machinery worse—if they are a part of it. They make one expect something better."

The P. G. S. of M. wished me to understand at this point that I was not made right, that I was incapable, helpless in a library, that I did not seem to know what to do unless I could have a simple, natural, or country relation to books.

"It doesn't follow," he said, "because you are bashful in a library, cannot get your mind to work there, with other people around, that the other people oughtn't to be around. There are a great many ways of using a library, and the more people there are crowded in with the books there, other things being equal, the better. It's what a library is for," he said, and a great deal more to the same effect.

I listened a while and told him that I supposed he was right. I supposed I had naturally a kind of wild mind. I allowed that the more a library in a general way took after a piece of woods, the more I enjoyed it. I did not attempt to deny that a library was made for the people, but I did think there ought to be places in libraries—all libraries—where wild ones, like me, could go. There ought to be in every library some uncultivated, uncatalogued, unlibrarianed tract where a man with a skittish or country mind will have a chance, where a man who likes to be alone with books—with books just as books—will be permitted to browze, unnoticed, bars all down, and frisk with his mind and roll himself, without turning over all of a sudden only to find a librarian's assistant standing there wondering at him, looking down to the bottom of his soul.

I am not in the least denying that librarians are well enough,—that is, might be well enough,—but as things are going to-day, they all seem to contribute, somehow, toward making a library a conscious and stilted place. They hold one up to the surface of things, with books. They make impossible to a man those freedoms of the spirit—those best times of all in a library, when one feels free to find one's mood, when one gets hold of one's divining-rod, opens down into a book, discovers a new, unconscious, subterranean self there.

The P. G. S. of M. broke in at this point and said this was all subjective folderol on my part—that I had better drop it—a kind of habit I had gotten into lately, of splitting the hairs of my emotions—or something to that effect. He went on at some length and took the general ground before he was through, that absolutely everything in modern libraries depended on the librarians. Librarians—I should judge—in a modern library were what books were for. He said that the more intelligent people were nowadays the more they enjoyed librarians—knew how to use them—doted on them, etc., ad infinitum.

"The kind of people one sees at operas," I interrupted, "listening with librettos, the kind of people who puff up mountains to see views and extract geography from them, the people one meets in the fields, nowadays, flower in one hand, botany in the other, the kind of people who have to have charts to enjoy stars with—these are the people who want librarians between them and their books. The more librarians they can get standing in a row between them and a masterpiece the more they feel they are appreciating it, the more card catalogues, gazetteers, dictionaries, derricks, and other machinery they can have pulling and hauling above their heads in a library the more literary they feel in it. They feel culture—somehow—stirring around them. They are not exactly sure what culture is, but they feel that a great deal of it—whatever it is—is being poured over into them."

But I must begin to bring these wanderings about libraries to a close. It can do no harm to remark, perhaps, that I am not maintaining—do not wish to maintain (I could not if I dared) that the modern librarian with all his faults is not useful at times. As a sort of pianola or aeolian attachment for a library, as a mechanical contrivance for making a comparatively ignorant man draw perfectly enormous harmonies out of it (which he does not care anything about), a modern librarian helps. All that I am maintaining is, that I am not this comparatively ignorant man. I am another one. I am merely saying that the pianola way of dealing with ignorance, in my own case, up to the present at least, does not grow on me.

V

O

I suppose that the Boston Public Library would say—if it said anything—that I had a mere Old Athenaeum kind of a mind. I am obliged to confess that I dote on the Old Athenaeum. It protects one's optimism. One is made to feel there—let right down in the midst of civilisation, within a stone's throw of the State House—that it is barely possible to keep civilisation off. One feels it rolling itself along, heaping itself up out on Tremont Street and the Common (the very trees cannot live in it), but one is out of reach. When one has to live in civilisation, as most of us do, nearly all of one's time every day in the week, it means a great deal. I can hardly say how much it means to me, in the daily struggle with it, to be able to dodge behind the Athenaeum, to be able to go in and sit down there, if only for a minute, to be behind glass, as it were, to hear great, hungry Tremont Street chewing men up, hundreds of trainloads at a time, into wood-pulp, smoothing them out into nobody or everybody; it makes one feel, while it is not as it ought to be, as if, after all, there might be some way out, as if some provision had been made in this world, or might be made, for letting human beings live on it.

The general sense of unsensitiveness in a modern library, of hurry and rush and efficiency, above all, the kind of moral smugness one feels there, the book-self-consciousness, the unprotected, public-street feeling one has—all these things are very grave and important obstacles which our great librarians, with their great systems—most of them—have yet to reckon with. A little more mustiness, gentlemen, please, silence, slowness, solitude with books, as if they were woods, unattainableness (and oh, will any one understand it?), a little inconvenience, a little old-fashioned, happy inconvenience; a chance to gloat and take pains and love things with difficulties, a chance to go around the corners of one's knowledge, to make modest discoveries all by one's self. It is no small thing to go about a library having books happen to one, to feel one's self sitting down with a book—one's own private Providence—turning the pages of events.

One cannot help feeling that if a part of the money that is being spent carnegieing nowadays, that is, in arranging for a great many books and a great many people to pile up order among a great many books, could be spent in providing hundreds of thousands of small libraries, or small places in large ones, where men who would like to do it would feel safe to creep in sometimes and open their souls—nobody looking—it would be no more than fair.

* * * * *

Postscript. One has to be so much of one's time helpless before a librarian in this world, one has to put him on his honour as a gentleman so much, to expose such vast, incredible tracts of ignorance to him, that I know only too well that I, of all men, cannot afford, in these pages or anywhere else, to say anything that will permanently offend librarians. I do hope I have not. It is only through knowing so many good ones that I know enough to criticise the rest. If I am right, it is because I am their spokesman. If I am wrong, I am not a well-informed person, and I do not count anywhere in particular on anything. The best way, I suspect, for a librarian to deal with me is not to try to classify me. I ought to be put out of the way on this subject, tucked back into any general pigeon-hole of odds and ends of temperament. If I had not felt that I could be cheerfully sorted out at the end of this page, filed away by everybody,—almost anybody,—as not making very much difference, I would not have spoken so freely. There is not a librarian who has read as far as this, in this book, who, though he may have had moments of being troubled in it, will not be able to dispose of me with a kind of grateful, relieved certainty. However that may be, I can only beg you, Oh, librarians, and all ye kindly learned ones, to be generous with me, wherever you put me. I leave my poor, naked, shivering, miscellaneous soul in your hands.



Book II

Possibilities

I

The Issue

I dreamed I lived in a day when men dared have visions. I lay in a great white Silence as one who waited for something.

And as I lay and waited, the Silence groped toward me and I felt it gathering nearer and nearer about me.

Then it folded me to Itself.

I made Time my bedside.

And it seemed to me, when I had rested my soul with years, and when I had found Space and had stretched myself upon it, I awoke.

I lay in a great white empty place, and the whole world like solemn music came to me.

And I looked, and behold in the shadow of the earth, which came and went, I saw Human Lives being tossed about. On the solemn rhythmic music, back and forth, I saw them lifted across Silence.

And I said to my Spirit, "What is it they are doing?"

"They are living," the Spirit said.

So they floated before me while The Great Shadow came and went.

* * * * *

"O my Soul, hast thou forgotten thy days in the world, when thou didst watch the processional of it, when the faces—day-lighted, night-lighted, faces—trooped before thee, and thou didst look upon them and delight in them? What didst thou see in the world?"

"I saw Two Immeasurable Hands in it," said my Soul, "over every man. I saw that the man did not see the Hands. I saw that they reached out of infinity for him down through the days and the nights. And whether he slept or prayed or wrought, I saw that they still reached out for him, and folded themselves about him."

And I asked God what The Hands were.

"The man calls them Heredity and Environment," God said.

And God laughed.

Words came from far for me and waited in tumult within me. But my mouth was filled with silence.

* * * * *

I know that I do not know the world, but out of my little corner of time and space I have watched in it,—watched men and truths struggling in it, and in the struggle it has seemed to me I have seen three kinds of men. I have seen the man who feels that he is being made, and the man who feels that he is making himself. But I have seen also another kind of man—the man who feels that the Universe is at work on him, but (within limits) under his own supervision.

I have made a compact in my soul with this man, for a new world. He is not willing to be a mere manufactured man—one more being turned out from The Factory of Circumstance—neither does he think very much of the man who makes himself—who could make himself. If he were to try such a thing—try to make a man himself, he would really rather try it, if the truth must be told, on some one else.

As near as he can define it, life seems to be (to the normal or inspired man) a kind of alternate grasping and being grasped. Sometimes he feels his destiny tossed between the Two Immeasurable Hands. Sometimes he feels that they have paused—that the Immeasurable Hands have been lent to him, that the toss of destiny is made his own.

He watches these two great forces playing under heaven, before his eyes, with his immortal life, every day. His soul takes these powers of heaven, as the mariner takes the winds of the sea. He tacks to destiny. He takes the same attitude toward the laws of heredity and environment that the Creator took when He made them. He takes it for granted that a God who made these laws as conveniences for Himself, in running a Universe, must have intended them for men as conveniences in living in it. In proportion as men have been like God they have treated these laws as He does—as conveniences. Thousands of men are doing it to-day. Men did it for thousands of years before they knew what the laws were, when they merely followed their instincts with them. In a man's answer to the question, How can I make a convenience of the law of heredity and environment?—education before being born and education after being born—will be found to lie always the secret glory or the secret shame of his life.

II

The First Selection

If the souls of the unborn could go about reconnoitering the earth a little before they settled on it, selecting the parents they would have, the places where it pleased them to be born, nine out of ten of them (judging from the way they conduct themselves in the flesh) would spend nearly all their time in looking for the best house and street to be born in, the best things to be born to. Such a little matter as selecting the right parents would be left, probably, to the last moment, or they would expect it to be thrown in.

We are all of us more or less aware, especially as we advance in life, that overlooking the importance of parents is a mistake. There have been times in the lives of some of us when having parents at all seemed a mistake. We can remember hours when we were sure we had the wrong ones. After our first disappointment,—that is, when we have learned how unmanageable parents are,—we have our time—most of us—of making comparisons, of trying other people's parents on. This cannot be said to work very well, taken as a whole, and it is generally admitted that people who are most serious about it, who take unto themselves fathers- and mothers-in-law seldom do any better than at first. The conclusion of the whole matter would seem to be: Since a man cannot select his parents and his parents cannot select him, he must select himself. That is what books are for.

III

Conveniences

It is the first importance of a true book that a man can select his neighbours with it,—can overcome space, riches, poverty, and time with it,—and the grave, and break bread with the dead. A book is a portable miracle. It makes a man's native place all over for him, for a dollar and a quarter; and many a man in this somewhat hard and despairing world has been furnished with a new heaven and a new earth for twenty-five cents. Out of a public library he has felt reached down to him the grasp of heroes. Hurrying home in the night, perhaps, with his tiny life hid under stars, but with a Book under his arm, he has felt a Greeting against his breast and held it tight. "Who art thou, my lad?" it said; "who art thou?" And the saying was not forgotten. If it is true that the spirits of the mighty dead are abroad in the night they are turning the leaves of books.

There are other inspiring things in the world, but there is nothing else that carries itself among the sons of men like the book. With such divine plenteousness—seeds of the worlds in it—it goes about flocking on the souls of men. There is something so broadcast, so universal about the way of a book with a man: boundless, subtle, ceaseless, irresistible, following him and loving him, renewing him, delighting in him and hoping for him—like a god. It is as the way of Nature herself with a man. One cannot always feel it, but somehow, when I am really living a real day, I feel as if some Great Book were around me—were always around me. I feel myself all-enfolded, penetrated, surrounded with it—the vast, gentle force of it—sky and earth of it. It is as if I saw it, sometimes, building new boundaries for me, out there—softly, gently, on the edges of the night—for me and for all human life.

Other inspiring things seem to be less steadfast for us. They cannot always free themselves and then come and free us. Music cannot be depended upon. It sings sometimes for and sometimes against us. Sometimes, also, music is still—absolutely still, all the way down from the stars to the grass. At best it is for some people and for others not, and is addicted to places. It is a part of the air—part of the climate in Germany, but there is but one country in the world made for listening in—where any one, every one listens, the way one breathes. The great pictures inspire, on the whole, but few people—most of them with tickets. Cathedrals cannot be unmoored, have never been seen by the majority of men at all, except in dreams and photographs. Most mountains (for all practical purposes) are private property. The sea (a look at the middle of it) is controlled by two or three syndicates. The sky—the last stronghold of freedom—is rented out for the most part, where most men live—in cities; and in New York and London the people who can afford it pay taxes for air, and grass is a dollar a blade. Being born is the only really free thing—and dying. Next to these in any just estimate of the comparatively free raw material that goes to the making of a human life comes the printed book.

A library, on the whole, is the purest and most perfect form of power that exists, because it is a lever on the nature of things. If a man is born with the wrong neighbours it brings the right ones flocking to him. It is the universe to order. It makes the world like a globe in a child's hands. He turns up the part where he chooses to live—now one way and now another, that he may delight in it and live in it. If he is a poet it is the meaning of life to him that he can keep on turning it until he has delighted and tasted and lived in all of it.

The second importance of true books is that they are not satisfied with the first. They are not satisfied to be used to influence a man from the outside—as a kind of house-furnishing for his soul. A true book is never a mere contrivance for arranging the right bit of sky for a man to live his life under, or the right neighbours for him to live his life with. It goes deeper than this. A mere playing upon a man's environment does not seem to satisfy a true book. It plays upon the latent infinity in the man himself. The majority of men are not merely conceived in sin and born in lies, but they are the lies; and lies as well as truths flow in their veins. Lies hold their souls back thousands of years. When one considers the actual facts about most men, the law of environment seems a clumsy and superficial law enough. If all that a book can do is to appeal to the law of environment for a man, it does not do very much. The very trees and stones do better for him, and the little birds in their nests. No possible amount of environment crowded on their frail souls would ever make it possible for most men to catch up—to overtake enough truth before they die to make their seventy years worth while. The majority of men (one hardly dares to deny) can be seen, sooner or later, drifting down to death either bitterly or indifferently. The shadows of their lives haunt us a little, then they vanish away from us and from the sound of our voices. Oh, God, from behind Thy high heaven—from out of Thy infinite wealth of years, hast Thou but the one same pittance of threescore and ten for every man? Some of us are born with the handicap of a thousand years woven in the nerves of our bodies, the swiftness of our minds, and the delights of our limbs. Others of us are born with the thousand years binding us down to blindness and hobbling, holding us back to disease, but all with the same Imperious Timepiece held above us, to run the same race, to overtake the same truth—before the iron curtain and the dark. Some of us—a few men in every generation—have two or three hundred years given to us outright the day we are born. Then we are given seventy more. Others of us have two hundred years taken away from us the day we are born. Then we are given seventy years to make them up in, and it is called life.

If we are to shut ourselves up with one law, either the law of environment or the law of heredity, it is obvious that the best a logical man could do, would be to be ashamed of a universe like this and creep out of it as soon as he could. The great glory of a great book is, that it will not let itself be limited to the law of environment in dealing with a man. It deals directly with the man himself. It appeals to the law of heredity. It reaches down into the infinite depth of his life. If a man has started a life with parents he had better not have (for all practical purposes), it furnishes him with better ones. It picks and chooses in behalf of his life out of his very grandfathers, for him. It not only supplies him with a new set of neighbours as often as he wants them. It sees that he is born again every morning on the wide earth and that he has a new set of parents to be born to. It is a part of the infinite and irrepressible hopefulness of this mortal life that each man of us who dwells on the earth is the child of an infinite marriage. We are all equipped, even the poorest of us, from the day we begin, with an infinite number of fathers and an infinite number of mothers—no telling, as we travel down the years, which shall happen to us next. If what we call heredity were a matter of a few months,—a narrow, pitiful, two-parent affair,—if the fate of a human being could be shut in with what one man and one woman, playing and working, eating and drinking, under heaven, for a score of years or more, would be likely to have to give him from out of their very selves, heredity would certainly be a whimsical, unjust, undignified law to come into a world by, to don an immortal soul with. A man who has had his life so recklessly begun for him could hardly be blamed for being reckless with it afterward. But it is not true that the principle of heredity in a human life can be confined to a single accident in it. We are all infinite, and our very accidents are infinite. In the very flesh and bones of our bodies we are infinite—brought from the furthest reaches of eternity and the utmost bounds of created life to be ourselves. If we were to do nothing else for threescore years, it is not in our human breath to recite our fathers' names upon our lips. Each of us is the child of an infinite mother, and from her breast, veiled in a thousand years, we draw life, glory, sorrow, sleep, and death. The ones we call fathers and mothers are but ambassadors to us—delegates from a million graves—appointed for our birth. Every boy is a summed-up multitude. The infinite crowd of his fathers beckons for him. As in some vast amphitheatre he lives his life, before the innumerable audience of the dead—each from its circle of centuries—calls to him, contends for him, draws him to himself.

Inasmuch as every man who is born in the world is born with an infinite outfit for living in it, it is the office of all books that are true and beautiful books—true to the spirit of a man—that they shall play upon the latent infinity in him; that they shall help him to select his largest self; that they shall help him to give, as the years go on, the right accent to the right fathers, in his life.

Books are more close to the latent infinity in a human being than anything else can be, because the habit of the infinite is their habit. As books are more independent of space and time than all other known forces in the lives of men, they seem to make all the men who love them independent also. If a man has not room for his life, he takes a book and makes room for it. When the habit of books becomes the habit of a man he unhands himself at will from space and time; he finds the universe is his universe. He finds ancestors and neighbours alike flocking to him—doing his bidding. God Himself says "Yes" to him and delights in him. He has entered into conspiracy with the nature of things. He does not feel that he is being made. He does not feel that he is making himself. The universe is at work on him—under his own supervision.

IV

The Charter of Possibility

In reading to select one's parents and one's self, there seem to be two instincts involved. These instincts may vary more or less according to the book and the mood of the reader, but the object of all live reading—of every live experience with a book—is the satisfying of one or both of them. A man whose reading means something to him is either letting himself go in a book or letting himself come in it. He is either reading himself out or reading himself in. It is as if every human life were a kind of port on the edge of the universe, when it reads,—possible selves outward-bound and inward-bound trooping before It. Some of these selves are exports and some are imports.

If the principle of selection is conceived in a large enough spirit, and is set in operation soon enough, and is continued long enough, there is not a child that can be born on the earth who shall not be able to determine by the use of books, in the course of the years, what manner of man he shall be. He may not be able to determine how soon he shall be that man, or how much of that man shall be fulfilled in himself before he dies, and how much of him shall be left over to be fulfilled in his children, but the fact remains that to an extraordinary degree, through a live use of books, not only a man's education after he is born, but his education before he is born, is placed in his hands. It is the supreme office of books that they do this; that they place the laws of heredity and environment where a man with a determined spirit can do something besides cringing to them. Neither environment nor heredity—taken by itself—can give a man a determined spirit, but it is everything to know that, given a few books and the determined spirit both, a man can have any environment he wants for living his life, and his own assorted ancestors for living it. It is only by means of books that a man can keep from living a partitioned-off life in the world—can keep toned up to the divine sense of possibility in it. We hear great men every day, across space and time, halloaing to one another in books, and across all things, as we feel and read, is the call of our possible selves. Even the impossible has been achieved, books tell us, in history, again and again. It has been achieved by several men. This may not prove very much, but if it does not prove anything else, it proves that the possible, at least, is the privilege of the rest of us. It has its greeting for every man. The sense of the possible crowds around him, and not merely in his books nor merely in his life, but in the place where his life and books meet—in his soul. However or wherever a man may be placed, it is the great book that reminds him Who he is. It reminds him who his Neighbour is. It is his charter of possibility. Having seen, he acts on what he sees, and reads himself out and reads himself in accordingly.

V

The Great Game

It would be hard to say which is the more important, reading for exports or imports, reading one's self out or reading one's self in, but inasmuch as the importance of reading one's self out is more generally overlooked, it may be well to dwell upon it. Most of the reading theories of the best people to-day, judging from the prohibitions of certain books, overlook the importance altogether, in vital and normal persons—especially the young,—of reading one's self out. It is only as some people keep themselves read out, and read out regularly, that they can be kept from bringing evil on the rest of us. If Eve had had a novel, she would have sat down under the Tree and read about the fruit instead of eating it. If Adam had had a morning paper, he would hardly have listened to his wife's suggestion. If the Evil One had come up to Eve in the middle of Les Miserables, or one of Rossetti's sonnets, no one would ever have heard of him. The main misfortune of Adam and Eve was that they had no arts to come to the rescue of their religion. If Eve could have painted the apple, she would not have eaten it. She put it into her mouth because she could not think of anything else to do with it, and she had to do something. She had the artistic temperament (inherited from her mother Sleep, probably, or from being born in a dream), and the temptation of the artistic temperament is, that it gets itself expressed or breaks something. She had tried everything—flowers, birds, clouds, and her shadow in the stream, but she found they were all inexpressible. She could not express them. She could not even express herself. Taking walks in Paradise and talking with the one man the place afforded was not a complete and satisfying self-expression. Adam had his limitations—like all men. There were things that could not be said.

Standing as we do on the present height of history, with all the resources of sympathy in the modern world, its countless arts drawing the sexes together, going about understanding people, communing with them, and expressing them, making a community for every man, even in his solitude, it is not hard to see that the comparative failure of the first marriage was a matter of course. The real trouble was that Adam and Eve, standing in their brand-new world, could not express themselves to one another. As there was nothing else to express them, they were bored. It is to Eve's credit that she was more bored than Adam was, and that she resented it more; and while a Fall, under the circumstances, was as painful as it was inevitable, and a rather extreme measure on Eve's part, no one will deny that it afforded relief on the main point. It seems to be the universal instinct of all Eve's sons and daughters that have followed since, that an expressive world is better than a dull one. An expressive world is a world in which all the men and women are getting themselves expressed, either in their experiences or in their arts—that is, in other people's experiences.

The play, the picture, and the poem and the novel and the symphony have all been the outgrowth of Eve's infinity. She could not contain herself. She either had more experience than she could express, or she had more to express than she could possibly put into experience.

One of the worst things that we know about the Japanese is that they have no imperative mood in the language. To be able to say of a nation that it has been able to live for thousands of years without feeling the need of an imperative, is one of the most terrible and sweeping accusations that has ever been made against a people on the earth. Swearing may not be respectable, but it is a great deal more respectable than never wanting to. Either a man is dead in this world, or he is out looking for words on it. There is a great place left over in him, and as long as that place is left over, it is one of the practical purposes of books to make it of some use to him. Whether the place is a good one or a bad one, something must be done with it, and books must do it.

If there were wordlessness for five hundred years, man would seek vast inarticulate words for himself. Cathedrals would rise from the ground undreamed as yet to say we worshipped. Music would be the daily necessity of the humblest life. Orchestras all around the world would be created,—would float language around the dumbness in it. Composers would become the greatest, the most practical men in all the nations. Viaducts would stretch their mountains of stone across the valleys to find a word that said we were strong. Out of the stones of the hills, the mists of rivers, out of electricity, even out of silence itself, we would force expression. From the time a baby first moves his limbs to when—an old man—he struggles for his last breath, the one imperious divine necessity of life is expression. Hence the artist now and for ever—the ruler of history—whoever makes it. And if he cannot make it, he makes the makers of it. The artist is the man who, failing to find neighbours for himself, makes his neighbours with his own hands. If a woman is childless, she paints Madonnas. It is the inspiration, the despair that rests over all life. If we cannot express ourselves in things that are made, we make things, and if we cannot express ourselves in the things we make, we turn to words, and if we cannot express ourselves in words, we turn to other men's words.

The man who is satisfied with one life does not exist. The suicide does not commit suicide because he is tired of life, but because he wants so many more lives that he cannot have. The native of the tropics buys a book to the North Pole. If we are poor, we grow rich on paper. We roll in carriages through the highway of letters. If we are rich, we revel in a printed poverty. We cry our hearts out over our starving paper-children and hold our shivering, aching magazine hands over dying coals in garrets we live in by subscription at three dollars a year. The Bible is the book that has influenced men most in the world because it has expressed them the most. The moment it ceases to be the most expressive book, it will cease to be the most practical and effective one in human life. There is more of us than we can live. The touch of the infinite through which our spirits wandered is still upon us. The world cries to the poet: "Give me a new word—a word—a word! I will have a word!" It cries to the great man out of all its narrow places: "Give me another life! I will have a new life!" and every hero the world has known is worn threadbare with worship, because his life says for other men what their lives have tried to say. Every masterful life calls across the world a cry of liberty to pent-up dreams, to the ache of faith in all of us, "Here thou art my brother—this is thy heart that I have lived." A hero is immortalised because his life is every man's larger self. So through the day-span of our years—a tale that is never told—we wander on, the infinite heart of each of us prisoned in blood and flesh and the cry of us everywhere, throughout all being, "Give me room!" It cries to the composer, "Make a high wide place for me!" and on the edge of the silence between life and words, to music we come at last because it is the supreme confidante of the human heart, the confessional, the world-priest between the actual self and the larger self of all of us. With all the multiplying of arts and the piling up of books that have come to us, the most important experience that men have had in this world since they began on it, is that they are infinite, that they cannot be expressed on it. It is not infrequently said that men must get themselves expressed in living, but the fact remains that no one has ever heard of a man as yet who really did it, or who was small enough to do it. There was One who seemed to express Himself by living and by dying both, but if He had any more than succeeded in beginning to express Himself, no one would have believed that He was the Son of God,—even that He was the Son of Man. It was because He could not crowd all that He was into thirty-three short years and twelve disciples and one Garden of Gethsemane and one Cross that we know who He was.

Riveted down to its little place with iron circumstance, the actual self in every man depends upon the larger possible self for the something that makes the actual self worth while. It is hard to be held down by circumstance, but it would be harder to be contented there, to live without those intimations of our diviner birth that come to us in books—books that weave some of the glory we have missed in our actual lives, into the glory of our thoughts. Even if life be to the uttermost the doing of what are called practical things, it is only by the occasional use of his imagination in reading or otherwise, that the practical man can hope to be in physical or mental condition to do them. He needs a rest from his actual self. A man cannot even be practical without this imaginary or larger self. Unless he can work off his unexpressed remnant, his limbs are not free. Even down to the meanest of us, we are incurably larger than anything we can do.

Reading a book is a game a man plays with his own infinity.

VI

Outward Bound

If there could only be arranged some mystical place over the edge of human existence, where we all could go and practise at living, have full-dress rehearsals of our parts, before we are hustled in front of the footlights in our very swaddling clothes, how many people are there who have reached what are fabulously called years of discretion, who would not believe in such a place, and who would not gladly go back to it and spend most of the rest of their lives there?

This is one of the things that the world of books is for. Most of us would hardly know what to do without it, the world of books, if only as a place to make mistakes and to feel foolish in. It seems to be the one great unobserved retreat, where all the sons of men may go, may be seen flocking day and night, to get the experiences they would not have, to be ready for those they cannot help having. It is the Rehearsal Room of History. The gods watch it—this Place of Books—as we who live go silent, trooping back and forth in it—the ceaseless, heartless, awful, beautiful pantomime of life.

It seems to be the testimony of human nature, after a somewhat immemorial experience, that some things in us had better be expressed by being lived, and that other things had better be expressed—if possible—in some other way.

There are a great many men, even amongst the wisest and strongest of us, who benefit every year of their lives by what might be called the purgative function of literature,—men who, if they did not have a chance at the right moment to commit certain sins with their imaginary selves, would commit them with their real ones. Many a man of the larger and more comprehensive type, hungering for the heart of all experience, bound to have its spirit, if not itself, has run the whole gamut of his possible selves in books, until all the sins and all the songs of men have coursed through his being. He finds himself reading not only to fill his lungs with ozone and his heart with the strength of the gods, but to work off the humour in his blood, to express his underself, and get it out of the way. Women who never cry their tears out—it is said—are desperate, and men who never read their sins away are dangerous. People who are tired of doing wrong on paper do right. To be sick of one's sins in a book saves not only one's self but every one else a deal of trouble. A man has not learned how to read until he reads with his veins as well as his arteries.

It would be useless to try to make out that evil passions in literature accomplish any absolute good, but they accomplish a relative good which the world can by no means afford to overlook. The amount of crime that is suggested by reading can be more than offset by the extraordinary amount of crime waiting in the hearts of men, aimed at the world and glanced off on paper.

There are many indications that this purgative function of literature is the main thing it is for in our present modern life. Modern life is so constituted that the majority of people who live in it are expressing their real selves more truly in their reading than they are in their lives. When one stops to consider what these lives are—most of them—there can be but one conclusion about the reading of the people who have to live them, and that is that while sensational reading may be an evil, as compared with the evil that has made it necessary, it is an immeasurable blessing.

The most important literary and artistic fact of the nineteenth century is the subdivision of labour—that is, the subdividing of every man's life and telling him he must only be alive in a part of it. In proportion as an age takes sensations out of men's lives it is obliged to put them into their literature. Men are used to sensations on the earth as long as they stay on it and they are bound to have them in one way or another. An age which narrows the actual lives of men, which so adjusts the labour of the world that nearly every man in it not only works with a machine, spiritual or otherwise, but is a machine himself, and a small part of a machine, must not find fault with its art for being full of hysterics and excitement, or with its newspapers for being sensational. Instead of finding fault it has every reason to be grateful—to thank a most merciful Heaven that the men in the world are still alive enough in it to be capable of feeling sensation in other men's lives, though they have ceased to be capable of having sensations in their own, or of feeling sensations if they had them. It was when the herds of her people were buried in routine and peace that Rome had bull-fights. New York, with its hordes of drudges, ledger-slaves, machinists, and clerks, has the New York World. It lasts longer than a bull-fight and it can be had every morning before a man starts off to be a machine and every evening when he gets back from being a machine—for one cent. On Sunday a whole Colosseum fronts him and he is glutted with gore from morning until night. To a man who is a penholder by the week, or a linotype machine, or a ratchet in a factory, a fight is infinite peace. Obedience to the command of Scripture, making the Sabbath a day of rest, is entirely relative. Some of us are rested by taking our under-interested lives to a Sunday paper, and others are rested by taking our over-interested lives to church. Men read dime novels in proportion as their lives are staid and mechanical. Men whose lives are their own dime novels are bored by printed ones. Men whose years are crowded with crises, culminations, and events, who run the most risks in business, are found with the steadiest papers in their hands. The train-boy knows that the people who buy the biggest headlines are all on salaries and that danger and blood and thunder are being read nowadays by effeminately safe men, because it is the only way they can be had.

But it is not only the things that are left out of men's lives but the things they have too much of, which find their remedy in books. They are the levers with which the morbid is controlled. Similia similibus curantur may be a dangerous principle to be applied by everybody, but thousands of men and women mulling away on their lives and worrying themselves with themselves, cutting a wide swath of misery wherever they go, have suddenly stopped in a book—have purged away jealousy and despair and passion and nervous prostration in it. A paper-person with melancholia is a better cure for gloom than a live clown can be—who merely goes about reminding people how sad they are.

A man is often heard to say that he has tragedy enough in his own life not to want to go to a play for more, but this much having been said and truly said, he almost always goes to the play—to see how true it is. The stage is his huge confidante. Pitying one's self is a luxury, but it takes a great while, and one can never do it enough. Being pitied by a five-thousand-dollar house, and with incidental music, all for a dollar and a half, is a sure and quick way to cheer up. Being pitied by Victor Hugo is a sure way also. Hardy can do people's pitying for them much better than they can do it, and it's soon over and done with. It is noticeable that while the impressive books, the books that are written to impress people, have a fair and nominal patronage, it is the expressive books, the books that let people out, which have the enormous sales. This seems to be true of the big-sale books whether the people expressed in them are worth expressing (to any one but themselves) or not. The principle of getting one's self expressed is so largely in evidence that not only the best but the worst of our books illustrate it. Our popular books are carbuncles mostly. They are the inevitable and irrepressible form of the instinct of health in us, struggling with disease. On the whole, it makes being an optimist in modern life a little less of a tight-rope-walk. If even the bad elements in current literature—which are discouraging enough—are making us better, what shall be said of the good?



Book III

Details. The Confessions of an Unscientific Mind



I—Unscientific

I

On Being Intelligent in a Library

I have a way every two or three days or so, of an afternoon, of going down to our library, sliding into the little gate by the shelves, and taking a long empty walk there. I have found that nothing quite takes the place of it for me,—wandering up and down the aisles of my ignorance, letting myself be loomed at, staring doggedly back. I always feel when I go out the great door as if I had won a victory. I have at least faced the facts. I swing off to my tramp on the hills where is the sense of space, as if I had faced the bully of the world, the whole assembled world, in his own den, and he had given me a license to live.

Of course it only lasts a little while. One soon feels a library nowadays pulling on him. One has to go back and do it all over again, but for the time being it affords infinite relief. It sets one in right relations to the universe, to the original plan of things. One suspects that if God had originally intended that men on this planet should be crowded off by books on it, it would not have been put off to the twentieth century.

I was saying something of this sort to The Presiding Genius of the State of Massachusetts the other day, and when I was through he said promptly: "The way a man feels in a library (if any one can get him to tell it) lets out more about a man than anything else in the world."

It did not seem best to make a reply to this. I didn't think it would do either of us any good.

Finally, in spite of myself, I spoke up and allowed that I felt as intelligent in a library as anybody.

He did not say anything.

When I asked him what he thought being intelligent in a library was, he took the general ground that it consisted in always knowing what one was about there, in knowing exactly what one wanted.

I replied that I did not think that that was a very intelligent state of mind to be in, in a library.

Then I waited while he told me (fifteen minutes) what an intelligent mind was anywhere (nearly everywhere, it seemed to me). But I did not wait in vain, and at last, when he had come around to it, and had asked me what I thought the feeling of intelligence consisted in, in libraries, I said it consisted in being pulled on by the books.

I said quite a little after this, and of course the general run of my argument was that I was rather intelligent myself. The P. G. S. of M. had little to say to this, and after he had said how intelligent he was awhile, the conversation was dropped.

* * * * *

The question that concerns me is, What shall a man do, how shall he act, when he finds himself in the hush of a great library,—opens the door upon it, stands and waits in the midst of it, with his poor outstretched soul all by himself before IT,—and feels the books pulling on him? I always feel as if it were a sort of infinite crossroads. The last thing I want to know in a library is exactly what I want there. I am tired of knowing what I want. I am always knowing what I want. I can know what I want almost anywhere. If there is a place left on God's earth where a modern man can go and go regularly and not know what he wants awhile, in Heaven's name why not let him? I am as fond as the next man, I think, of knowing what I am about, but when I find myself ushered into a great library I do not know what I am about any sooner than I can help. I shall know soon enough—God forgive me! When it is given to a man to stand in the Assembly Room of Nations, to feel the ages, all the ages, gathering around him, flowing past his life; to listen to the immortal stir of Thought, to the doings of The Dead, why should a man interrupt—interrupt a whole world—to know what he is about? I stand at the junction of all Time and Space. I am the three tenses. I read the newspaper of the universe.

It fades away after a little, I know. I go to the card catalogue like a lamb to the slaughter, poke my head into Knowledge—somewhere—and am lost, but the light of it on the spirit does not fade away. It leaves a glow there. It plays on the pages afterward.

There is a certain fine excitement about taking a library in this fashion, a sense of spaciousness of joy in it, which one is almost always sure to miss in libraries—most libraries—by staying in them. The only way one can get any real good out of a modern library seems to be by going away in the nick of time. If one stays there is no help for it. One is soon standing before the card catalogue, sorting one's wits out in it, filing them away, and the sense of boundlessness both in one's self and everybody else—the thing a library is for—is fenced off for ever.

At least it seems fenced off for ever. One sees the universe barred and patterned off with a kind of grating before it. It is a card-catalogue universe.

I can only speak for one, but I must say for myself, that as compared with this feeling one has in the door, this feeling of standing over a library—mere reading in it, sitting down and letting one's self be tucked into a single book in it—is a humiliating experience.

II

How It Feels

I am not unaware that this will seem to some—this empty doting on infinity, this standing and staring at All-knowledge—a mere dizzying exercise, whirling one's head round and round in Nothing, for Nothing. And I am not unaware that it would be unbecoming in me or in any other man to feel superior to a card catalogue.

A card catalogue, of course, as a device for making a kind of tunnel for one's mind in a library—for working one's way through it—is useful and necessary to all of us. Certainly, if a man insists on having infinity in a convenient form—infinity in a box—it would be hard to find anything better to have it in than a card catalogue.

But there are times when one does not want infinity in a box. He loses the best part of it that way. He prefers it in its natural state. All that I am contending for is, that when these times come, the times when a man likes to feel infinite knowledge crowding round him,—feel it through the backs of unopened books, and likes to stand still and think about it, worship with the thought of it,—he ought to be allowed to. It is true that there is no sign up against it (against thinking in libraries). But there might as well be. It amounts to the same thing. No one is expected to. People are expected to keep up an appearance, at least, of doing something else there. I do not dare to hope that the next time I am caught standing and staring in a library, with a kind of blank, happy look, I shall not be considered by all my kind intellectually disreputable for it. I admit that it does not look intelligent—this standing by a door and taking in a sweep of books—this reading a whole library at once. I can imagine how it looks. It looks like listening to a kind of cloth and paper chorus—foolish enough; but if I go out of the door to the hills again, refreshed for them and lifted up to them, with the strength of the ages in my limbs, great voices all around me, flocking my solitary walk—who shall gainsay me?

III

How a Specialist can Be an Educated Man

It is a sad thing to go into a library nowadays and watch the people there who are merely making tunnels through it. Some libraries are worse than others—seem to be made for tunnels. College libraries, perhaps, are the worst. One can almost—if one stands still enough in them—hear what is going on. It is getting to be practically impossible in a college library to slink off to a side shelf by one's self, take down some gentle-hearted book one does not need to read there and begin to listen in it, without hearing some worthy person quietly, persistently boring himself around the next corner. It is getting worse every year. The only way a readable library book can be read nowadays is to take it away from the rest of them. It must be taken where no other reading is going on. The busy scene of a crowd of people—mere specialists and others—gathered around roofing their minds in is no fitting place for a great book or a live book to be read—a book that uncovers the universe.

On the other hand, it were certainly a trying universe if it were uncovered all the time, if one had to be exposed to all of it and to all of it at once, always; and there is no denying that libraries were intended to roof men's minds in sometimes as well as to take the roofs of their minds off. What seems to be necessary is to find some middle course in reading between the scientist's habit of tunnelling under the dome of knowledge and the poet's habit of soaring around in it. There ought to be some principle of economy in knowledge which will allow a man, if he wants to, or knows enough, to be a poet and a scientist both. It is well enough for a mere poet to take a library as a spectacle—a kind of perpetual Lick Observatory to peek at the universe with, if he likes, and if a man is a mere scientist, there is no objection to his taking a library as a kind of vast tunnel system, or chart for burrowing. But the common educated man—the man who is in the business of being a human being, unless he knows some middle course in a library, knows how to use its Lick Observatory and its tunnel system both—does not get very much out of it. If there can be found some principle of economy in knowledge, common to artists and scientists alike, which will make it possible for a poet to know something, and which will make it possible for a scientist to know a very great deal without being—to most people—a little underwitted, it would very much simplify the problem of being educated in modern times, and there would be a general gratefulness.

Far be it from me to seem to wish to claim this general gratefulness for myself. I have no world-reforming feeling about the matter. I would be very grateful just here to be allowed to tuck in a little idea—no chart to go with it—on this general subject, which my mind keeps coming back to, as it runs around watching people.

There seem to be but two ways of knowing. One of them is by the spirit and the other is by the letter. The most reasonable principle of economy in knowledge would seem to be, that in all reading that pertains to man's specialty—his business in knowledge—he should read by the letter, knowing the facts by observing them himself, and that in all other reading he should read through the spirit of imagination—the power of taking to one's self facts that have been observed by others. If a man wants to be a specialist he must do his knowing like a scientist; but if a scientist wants to be a man he must be a poet; he must learn how to read like a poet; he must educate in himself the power of absorbing immeasurable knowledge, the facts of which have been approved and observed by others.

The weak point in our modern education seems to be that it has broken altogether with the spirit or the imagination. Playing upon the spirit or the imagination of a man is the one method possible to employ in educating him in everything except his specialty. It is the one method possible to employ in making even a powerful specialist of him; in relating his specialty to other specialties; that is, in making either him or his specialty worth while.

Inasmuch as it has been decreed that every man in modern life must be a specialist, the fundamental problem that confronts modern education is, How can a specialist be an educated man? There would seem to be but one way a specialist can be an educated man. The only hope for a specialist lies in his being allowed to have a soul (or whatever he chooses to call it), a spirit or an imagination. If he has This, whatever it is, in one way or another, he will find his way to every book he needs. He will read all the books there are in his specialty. He will read all other books through their backs.

IV

On Reading Books through Their Backs

As this is the only way the majority of books can be read by anybody, one wonders why so little has been said about it.

Reading books through their backs is easily the most important part of a man's outfit, if he wishes to be an educated man. It is not necessary to prove this statement. The books themselves prove it without even being opened. The mere outside of a library—almost any library—would seem to settle the point that if a man proposes to be in any larger or deeper sense a reader of books, the books must be read through their backs.

Even the man who is obliged to open books in order to read them sooner or later admits this. He finds the few books he opens in the literal or unseeing way do not make him see anything. They merely make him see that he ought to have opened the others—that he must open the others; that is, if he is to know anything. The next thing he sees is that he must open all the others to know anything. When he comes to know this he may be said to have reached what is called, by stretch of courtesy, a state of mind. It is the scientific state of mind. Any man who has watched his mind a little knows what this means. It is the first incipient symptom in a mind that science is setting in.

The only possible cure for it is reading books through their backs. As this scientific state of mind is the main obstacle nowadays in the way of reading books through their backs, it is fitting, perhaps, at this point that I should dwell on it a little.

I do not claim to be a scientist, and I have never—even in my worst moments—hoped for a scientific mind. I am afraid I know as well as any one who has read as far as this, in this book, that I cannot prove anything. The book has at least proved that; but it does seem to me that there are certain things that very much need to be said about the scientific mind, in its general relation to knowledge. I would give the world to be somebody else for awhile and say them—right here in the middle of my book. But I know as well as any one, after all that has passed, that if I say anything about the scientific mind nobody will believe it. The best I can do is to say how I feel about the scientific mind. "And what has that to do with it?" exclaims the whole world and all its laboratories. What is really wanted in dealing with this matter seems to be some person—some grave, superficial person—who will take the scientific mind up scientifically, shake it and filter it, put it under the microscope, stare at it with a telescope, stick the X-ray through it, lay it on the operating table—show what is the matter with it—even to itself. Anything that is said about the scientific mind which is not said in a big, bow-wow, scientific, impersonal, out-of-the-universe sort of way will not go very far.

And yet, the things that need to be said about the scientific mind—the things that need to be done for it—need to be said and done so very much, that it seems as if almost any one might help. So I am going to keep on trying. Let no one suppose, however, that because I have turned around the corner into another chapter, I am setting myself up as a sudden and new authority on the scientific mind. I do not tell how it feels to be scientific. I merely tell how it looks as if it felt.

I have never known a great scientist, and I can only speak of the kind of scientist I have generally met—the kind every one meets nowadays, the average, bare scientist. He always looks to me as if he had a grudge against the universe—jealous of it or something. There are so many things in it he cannot know and that he has no use for unless he does. It always seems to me (perhaps it seems so to most of us in this world, who are running around and enjoying things and guessing on them) that the average scientist has a kind of dreary and disgruntled look, a look of feeling left out. Nearly all the universe goes to waste with a scientist. He fixes himself so that it has to. If a man cannot get the good of a thing until he knows it and knows all of it, he cannot expect to be happy in this universe. There are no conveniences for his being happy in it. It is the wrong size, to begin with. Exact knowledge at its best, or even at its worst, does not let a man into very many things in a universe like this one. A large part of it is left over with a scientist. It is the part that is left over which makes him unhappy. I am not claiming that a scientist, simply because he is a scientist, is any unhappier or needs to be any unhappier than other men are. He does not need to be. It all comes of a kind of brutal, sweeping, overriding prejudice he has against guessing on anything.

V

On Keeping Each Other in Countenance

I do not suppose that my philosophising on this subject—a sort of slow, peristaltic action of my own mind—is of any particular value; that it really makes any one feel any better except myself.

But it has just occurred to me that I may have arisen, quite as well as not, without knowing it, to the dignity of the commonplace.

"The man who thinks he is playing a solo in any human experience," says this morning's paper, "only needs a little more experience to know that he is a member of a chorus." I suspect myself of being a Typical Case. The scientific mind has taken possession of all the land. It has assumed the right of eminent domain in it, and there must be other human beings here and there, I am sure, standing aghast at learning in our modern day, even as I am, their whys and wherefores working within them, trying to wonder their way out in this matter.

All that is necessary, as I take it, is for one or the other of us to speak up in the world, barely peep in it, make himself known wherever he is, tell how he feels, and he will find he is not alone. Then we will get together. We will keep each other in countenance. We will play with our minds if we want to. We will take the liberty of knowing rows of things we don't know all about, and we will be as happy as we like, and if we keep together we will manage to have a fairly educated look besides. I am very sure of this. But it is the sort of thing a man cannot do alone. If he tries to do it with any one else, any one that happens along, he is soon come up with. It cannot be done in that way. There is no one to whom to turn. Almost every mind one knows in this modern educated world is a suspicious, unhappy, abject, helpless, scientific mind.

It is almost impossible to find a typical educated mind, either in this country or in Europe or anywhere, that is not a rolled-over mind, jealous and crushed by knowledge day and night, and yet staring at its ignorance everywhere. The scientist is almost always a man who takes his mind seriously, and he takes the universe as seriously as he takes his mind. Instead of glorying in a universe and being a little proud of it for being such an immeasurable, unspeakable, unknowable success, his whole state of being is one of worry about it. The universe seems to irritate him somehow. Has he not spent years of hard labour in making his mind over, in drilling it into not-thinking, into not-inferring things, into not-knowing anything he does not know all of? And yet here he is and here is his whole life—does it not consist in being baffled by germs and bacilli, crowed over by atoms, trampled on by the stars? It is getting so that there is but one thing left that the modern, educated scientific mind feels that it knows and that is the impossibility of knowledge. Certainly if there is anything in this wide world that can possibly be in a more helpless, more pulp-like state than the scientific mind in the presence of something that cannot be known, something that can only be used by being wondered at (which is all most of the universe is for), it has yet to be pointed out.

He may be better off than he looks, and I don't doubt he quite looks down on me as,

A mere poet, The Chanticleer of Things, Who lives to flap his wings— It's all he knows,— They're never furled; Who plants his feet On the ridge-pole of the world And crows.

Still, I like it very well. I don't know anything better that can be done with the world, and as I have said before I say again, my friend and brother, the scientist, is either very great or very small, or he is moderately, decently unhappy. At least this is the way it looks from the ridge-pole of the world.

VI

The Romance of Science

Science is generally accredited with being very matter-of-fact. But there has always been one romance in science from the first,—its romantic attitude toward itself. It would be hard to find any greater romance in modern times. The romance of science is the assumption that man is a plain, pure-blooded, non-inferring, mere-observing being and that in proportion as his brain is educated he must not use it. "Deductive reasoning has gone out with the nineteenth century," says The Strident Voice. This is the one single inference that the scientific method seems to have been able to make—the inference that no inference has a right to exist.

So far as I can see, if there are going to be inferences anyway, and one has to take one's choice in inferring, I would rather have a few inferences on hand that I can live with every day than to have this one huge, voracious inference (the scientist's) which swallows all the others up. For that matter, when the scientist has actually made it,—this one huge guess that he hasn't a right to guess,—what good does it do him? He never lives up to it, and all the time he has his poor, miserable theory hanging about him, dogging him day and night. Does he not keep on guessing in spite of himself? Does he not live plumped up against mystery every hour of his life, crowded on by ignorance, forced to guess if only to eat? Is he not browbeaten into taking things for granted whichever way he turns? He becomes a doleful, sceptical, contradictory, anxious, disagreeable, disapproving person as a matter of course.

One would think, in the abstract, that a certain serenity would go with exact knowledge; and it would, if a man were willing to put up with a reasonable amount of exact knowledge, eke it out with his brains, some of it; but when he wants all the exact knowledge there is, and nothing else but exact knowledge, and is not willing to mix his brains with it, it is different. When a man puts his whole being into a vise of exact knowledge, he finds that he has about as perfect a convenience for being miserable as could possibly be devised. He soon becomes incapable of noticing things or of enjoying things in the world for themselves. With one or two exceptions, I have never known a scientist to whom his knowing a thing, or not knowing it, did not seem the only important thing about it. Of course when a man's mind gets into this dolefully cramped, exact condition, a universe like this is not what it ought to be for him. He lives too unprotected a life. His whole attitude toward the universe becomes one of wishing things would keep off of him in it—things he does not know. Are there not enough things he does not know even in his specialty? And as for this eternal being reminded of the others, this slovenly habit of "general information" that interesting people have—this guessing, inferring, and generalising—what is it all for? What does it all come to? If a man is after knowledge, let him have knowledge, knowledge that is knowledge, let him find a fact, anything for a fact, get God into a corner, hug one fact and live with it and die with it.

When a man once gets into this shut-in attitude it is of little use to put a word in, with him, for the daily habit of taking the roof off one's mind, letting the universe play upon it instead of trying to bore a hole in it somewhere. "What does it avail after all, after it is all over, after a long life, even if the hole is bored," I say to him, "to stand by one's little hole and cry, 'Behold, oh, human race, this Gimlet Hole which I have bored in infinite space! Let it be forever named for me.'" And in the meantime the poor fellow gets no joy out of living. He does not even get credit for his not-living, seventy years of it. He fences off his little place to know a little of nothing in, becomes a specialist, a foot note to infinite space, and is never noticed afterwards (and quite reasonably) by any one—not even by himself.

VII

Monads

I am not saying that this is the way a scientist—a mere scientist, one who has the fixed habit of not reading books through their backs—really feels. It is the way he ought to feel. As often as not he feels quite comfortable. One sees one every little while (the mere scientist) dropping the entire universe with a dull thud and looking happy after it.

But the best ones are different. Even those who are not quite the best are different. It is really a very rare scientist who joggles contentedly down without qualms, or without delays, to a hole in space. There is always a capability, an apparently left-over capability in him. What seems to happen is, that when the average human being makes up his mind to it, insists on being a scientist, the Lord keeps a remnant of happiness in him—a gnawing on the inside of him which will not let him rest.

This remnant of happiness in him, his soul, or inferring organ, or whatever it may be, makes him suspect that the scientific method as a complete method is a false, superficial, and dangerous method, threatening the very existence of all knowledge that is worth knowing on the earth. He begins to suspect that a mere scientist, a man who cannot even make his mind work both ways, backwards or forwards, as he likes (the simplest, most rudimentary motion of a mind), inductively or deductively, is bound to have something left out of all of his knowledge. He sees that the all-or-nothing assumption in knowledge, to say nothing of not applying to the arts, in which it is always sterile, does not even apply to the physical sciences—to the mist, dust, fire, and water out of which the earth and the scientist are made.

For men who are living their lives as we are living ours, in the shimmer of a globule in space, it is not enough that we should lift our faces to the sky and blunder and guess at a God there, because there is so much room between the stars, and murmur faintly, "Spiritual things are spiritually discerned." By the infinite bones of our bodies, by the seeds of the million years that flow in our veins, material things are spiritually discerned. There is not science enough nor scientific method enough in the schools of all Christendom for a man to listen intelligently to his own breathing with, or to know his own thumb-nail. Is not his own heart thundering the infinite through him—beating the eternal against his sides—even while he speaks? And does he not know it while he speaks?

By the time a man's a Junior or a Senior nowadays, if he feels the eternal beating against his sides he thinks it must be something else. He thinks he ought to. It is a mere inference. At all events he has little use for it unless he knows just how eternal it is. I am speaking too strongly? I suppose I am. I am thinking of my four special boys—boys I have been doing my living in, the last few years. I cannot help speaking a little strongly. Two of them—two as fine, flash-minded, deep-lit, wide-hearted fellows as one would like to see, are down at W——, being cured of inferring in a four years' course at the W—— Scientific School. Another one, who always seemed to me to have real genius in him, who might have had a period in literature named after him, almost, if he'd stop studying literature, is taking a graduate course at M——, learning that it cannot be proved that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. He has already become one of these spotlessly accurate persons one expects nowadays. (I hardly dare to hope he will even read this book of mine, with all his affection for me, after the first few pages or so, lest he should fall into a low or wondering state of mind.) My fourth boy, who was the most promising of all, whose mind reached out the farthest, who was always touching new possibilities, a fresh, warm-blooded, bright-eyed fellow, is down under a manhole studying God in the N—— Theological Seminary.

This may not be exactly a literal statement, nor a very scientific way to criticise the scientific method, but when one has had to sit and see four of the finest minds he ever knew snuffed out by it,—whatever else may be said for science, scientific language is not satisfying. What is going to happen to us next, in our little town, I hardly dare to know. I only know that three relentlessly inductive, dull, brittle, blase, and springless youths from S—— University have just come down and taken possession of our High School. They seem to be throwing, as near as I can judge, a spell of the impossibility of knowledge over the boys we have left.

I admit that I am in an unreasonable state of mind.[3] I think a great many people are. At least I hope so. There is no excuse for not being a little unreasonable. Sometimes it almost seems, when one looks at the condition of most college boys' minds, as if our colleges were becoming the moral and spiritual and intellectual dead-centres of modern life.

[3] Fact.

I will not yield to any man in admiration for Science—holy and speechless Science; holier than any religion has ever been yet; what religions are made of and are going to be made of, nor am I dating my mind three hundred years back and trying to pick a quarrel with Lord Bacon. I am merely wondering whether, if science is to be taught at all, it had not better be taught, in each branch of it, by men who are teaching a subject they have conceived with their minds instead of a subject which has been merely unloaded on them, piled up on top of their minds, and which their minds do not know anything about.

No one seems to have stopped to notice what the spectacle of science as taught in college is getting to be—the spectacle of one set of minds which has been crunched by knowledge crunching another set. Have you never been to One, oh Gentle Reader, and watched It, watched It when It was working, one of these great Endowed Fact-machines, wound up by the dead, going round and round, thousands and thousands of youths in it being rolled out and chilled through and educated in it, having their souls smoothed out of them? Hundreds of human minds, small and sure and hard, working away on thousands of other human minds, making them small and sure and hard. Matter—infinite matter everywhere—taught by More Matter,—taught the way Matter would teach if it knew how—without generalising, without putting facts together to make truths out of them.

It would seem, looking at it theoretically, that Science, of all things in this world, the stuff that dreams are made of; the one boundless subject of the earth, face to face and breath to breath with the Creator every minute of its life, would be taught with a divine touch in it, with the appeal to the imagination and the soul, to the world-building instinct in a man, the thing in him that puts universes together, the thing in him that fills the whole dome of space and all the crevices of being with the whisper of God.

But it is not so. Science is great, and great scientists are great as a matter of course; but the sciences in the meantime are being taught in our colleges—in many of them, most of them—by men whose minds are mere registering machines. The facts are put in at one end (one click per fact) and come out facts at the other. The sciences are being taught more and more every year by moral and spiritual stutterers, men with non-inferring minds, men who live in a perfect deadlock of knowledge, men who cannot generalise about a fly's wing, bashful, empty, limp, and hopeless and doddering before the commonplacest, sanest, and simplest generalisations of human life. In The Great Free Show, in our common human peep at it, who has not seen them, staggering to know what the very children, playing with dolls and rocking-horses, can take for granted? Minds which seem absolutely incapable of striking out, of taking a good, manly stride on anything, mincing in religion, effeminate in enthusiasm—please forgive me, Gentle Reader, I know I ought not to carry on in this fashion, but have I not spent years in my soul (sometimes it seems hundreds of years) in being humble—in being abject before this kind of mind? It is only a day almost since I have found it out, broken away from it, got hold of the sky to hoot at it with. I am free now. I am not going to be humble longer, before it. I have spent years dully wondering before this mind; wondering what was the matter with me that I could not love it, that I could not go where it loved to go, and come when it said "Come" to me. I have spent years in dust and ashes before it, struggling with myself, trying to make myself small enough to follow this kind of a mind around, and now the scales are fallen from my eyes. When I follow An Inductive Scientific Mind now, or try to follow it through its convolutions of matter-of-fact, its involutions of logic, its wriggling through axioms, I smile a new smile and my heart laughs within me. If I miss the point, I am not in a panic, and if, at the end of the seventeenth platitude that did not need to be proved, I find I do not know where I am, I thank God.

I know that I am partly unreasonable, and I know that in my chosen station on the ridge-pole of the world it is useless to criticise those who do not even believe, probably, that worlds have ridge-poles. It is a bit hard to get their attention—and I hope the reader will overlook it if one seems to speak rather loud—from ridge-poles. Oh, ye children of The Literal! ye most serene Highnesses, ye archangels of Accuracy, the Voices of life all challenge you—the world around! What are ye, after all, but pilers-up of matter, truth-stutterers, truth-spellers, sunk in protoplasm to the tops of your souls? What is it that you are going to do with us? How many generations of youths do you want? When will souls be allowed again? When will they be allowed in college?

Well, well, I say to my soul, what does it all come to? Why all this ado about it one way or the other? Is it not a great, fresh, eager, boundless world? Does it not roll up out of Darkness with new children on it, night after night? What does it matter, I say to my soul-a generation or so—from the ridge-pole of the world? The great Sun comes round again. It travels over the tops of seas and mountains. Microbes in their dewdrops, seeds in their winds, stars in their courses, worms in their apples, answer it, and the hordes of the ants in their ant-hills run before it. And what does it matter after all, under the great Dome, a few hordes of factmongers more or less, glimmering and wonderless, crawlers on the bottom of the sea of time, lovers of the ooze of knowledge, feeling with slow, myopic mouths at Infinite Truth?

But when I see my four faces—the faces of my four special boys, when I hear the college bells ringing to them, it matters a great deal. My soul will not wait. What is the ridge-pole of the world? The distance of a ridge-pole does not count. The extent of a universe does not seem to make very much difference. The next ten generations do not help very much on this one. I go forth in my soul. I take hold of the first scientist I meet—my whole mind pummelling him. "What is it?" I say, "what is it you are doing with us and with the lives of our children? What is it you are doing with yourself? Truth is not a Thing. Did you think it? Truth is not even a Heap of Things. It is a Light. How dare you mock at inferring? How dare you to think to escape the infinite? You cannot escape the infinite even by making yourself small enough. It is written that thou shalt be infinitely small if thou art not infinitely large. Not to infer is to contradict the very nature of facts. Not to infer is not to live. It is to cease to be a fact one's self. What is education if one does not infer? Vacuums rolling around in vacuums. Atoms cross-examining atoms. And you say you will not guess? Do you need to be cudgelled with a whole universe to begin to learn to guess? What is all your science—your boasted science, after all, but more raw material to make more guesses with? Is not the whole Future Tense an inference? Is not History—that which has actually happened—a mystery? You yourself are a mere probability, and God is a generalisation. What does it profit a man to discover The Inductive Method and to lose his own soul? What is The Inductive Method? Do you think that all these scientists who have locked their souls up and a large part of their bodies, in The Inductive Method, if they had waited to be born by The Inductive Method, would ever have heard of it? Being born is one inference and dying is another. Man leaves a wake of infinity after him wherever he goes, and of course it's where he doesn't go. It's all infinity—one way or the other."

* * * * *

And it came to pass in my dream as I lay on my bed in the night, I thought I saw Man my brother blinking under the dome of space, infinite monad that he is: I saw him with a glass in one hand and a Slide of Infinity in the other, and, in my dream, out of His high heaven God leaned down to me and said to me, "What is THAT?"

And as I looked I laughed and prayed in my heart, I scarce knew which, and "Oh, Most Excellent Deity! Who would think it!" I cried. "I do not know, but I think—I think—it is a man, thinking he is studying a GERM—one tiny particle of inimitable Immensity ogling another!"

And a very pretty sight it is, too, oh Brother Monads—if we do not take it seriously.

And what we really need next, oh comrades, scientists—each under our separate stones—is the Laugh Out of Heaven which shall come down and save us—laugh the roofs of our stones off. Then we shall stretch our souls with inferences. We shall lie in the great sun and warm ourselves.

VIII

Multiplication Tables

It would seem to be the main trouble with the scientific mind of the second rank that it overlooks the nature of knowledge in the thirst for exact knowledge. In an infinite world the better part of the knowledge a man needs to have does not need to be exact.

These things being as they are, it would seem that the art of reading books through their backs is an equally necessary art to a great scientist and to a great poet. If it is necessary to great scientists and to great poets it is all the more necessary to small ones, and to the rest of us. It is the only way, indeed, in which an immortal human being of any kind can get what he deserves to have to live his life with—a whole cross-section of the universe. A gentleman and a scholar will take nothing less.

If a man is to get his cross-section of the universe, his natural share in it, he can only get it by living in the qualities of things instead of the quantities; by avoiding duplicate facts, duplicate persons, and principles; by using the multiplication table in knowledge (inference) instead of adding everything up, by taking all things in this world (except his specialty) through their spirits and essences, and, in general, by reading books through their backs.

The problem of cultivating these powers in a man, when reduced to its simplest terms, is reduced to the problem of cultivating his imagination or organ of not needing to be told things.

However much a man may know about wise reading and about the principles of economy in knowledge, in an infinite world the measure of his knowledge is bound to be determined, in the long run, by the capacity of his organ of not needing to be told things—of reading books through their backs.



II—On Reading for Principles

I

On Changing One's Conscience

We were sitting by my fireplace—several of our club. I had just been reading out loud a little thing of my own. I have forgotten the title. It was something about Books that Other People ought to Read, I think. I stopped rather suddenly, rather more suddenly than anybody had hoped. At least nobody had thought what he ought to say about it. And I saw that the company, after a sort of general, vague air of having exclaimed properly, was settling back into the usual helpless silence one expects—after the appearance of an idea at clubs.

"Why doesn't somebody say something?" I said.

P. G. S. of M.: "We are thinking."

"Oh," I said. I tried to feel grateful. But everybody kept waiting.

I was a good deal embarrassed and was getting reckless and was about to make the very serious mistake, in a club, of seeing if I could not rescue one idea by going out after it with another, when The Mysterious Person (who is the only man in our club whose mind ever really comes over and plays in my yard) in the goodness of his heart spoke up. "I have not heard anything in a long time," he began (the club looked at him rather anxiously), "which has done—which has made me feel—less ashamed of myself than this paper. I——"

It seemed to me that this was not exactly a fortunate remark. I said I didn't doubt I could do a lot of good that way, probably, if I wanted to—going around the country making people less ashamed of themselves.

"But I don't mean that I feel really ashamed of myself about books I have not read," said The Mysterious Person. "What I mean is, that I have a kind of slinking feeling that I ought to—a feeling of being ashamed for not being ashamed."

I told The M. P. that I thought New England was full of people; just like him—people with a lot of left-over consciences.

The P. G. S. of M. wanted to know what I meant by that.

I said I thought there were thousands of people—one sees them everywhere in Massachusetts—fairly intelligent people, people who are capable of changing their minds about things, but who can't change their consciences. Their consciences seem to keep hanging on to them, in the same set way—somehow—with or without their minds. "Some people's consciences don't seem to notice much, so far as I can see, whether they have minds connected with them or not." "Don't you know what it is," I appealed to the P. G. S. of M., "to get everything all fixed up with your mind and your reason and your soul; that certain things that look wrong are all right,—the very things of all others that you ought to do and keep on doing,—and then have your conscience keep right on the same as it always did—tatting them up against you?"

The P. G. S. of M. said something about not spending very much time thinking about his conscience.

I said I didn't believe in it, but I thought that if a man had one, it was apt to trouble him a little off and on—especially if the one he had was one of these left-over ones. "If you had one of these consciences—I mean the kind of conscience that pretends to belong to you, and acts as if it belonged to some one else," I said "one of these dead-frog-leg, reflex-action consciences, working and twitching away on you day and night, the way I have, you'd have to think about it sometimes. You'd get so ashamed of it. You'd feel trifled with so. You'd——"

The P. G. S. of M. said something about not being very much surprised—over my case. He said that people who changed their minds as often as I did couldn't reasonably expect consciences spry enough.

His general theory seemed to be that I had a conscience once and wore it out.

"It's getting to be so with everybody nowadays," he said. "Nobody is settled. Everything is blown about. We do not respect tradition either in ourselves or in the life about us. No one listens to the Voice of Experience."

"There she blows!" I said. I knew it was coming sooner or later. I added that one of the great inconveniences of life, it seemed to me, was the Intolerance of Experienced People.

II

On the Intolerance of Experienced People

It is generally assumed by persons who have taken the pains to put themselves in this very disagreeable class, that people in general—all other people—are as inexperienced—as they look. If a man speaks on a subject at all in their presence, they assume he speaks autobiographically. These people are getting thicker every year. One can't go anywhere without finding them standing around with a kind of "How-do-you-know?" and "Did-it-happen-to-you?" air every time a man says something he knows by—well—by seeing it—perfectly plain seeing it. One doesn't need to stand up to one's neck in experience, in a perfect muck of experience, in order to know things, in order to know they are there. People who are experienced within an inch of their lives, submerged in experience, until all you can see of them is a tired look, are always calling out to the man who sees a thing as he is going by—sees it, I mean, with his mind; sees it without having to put his feet in it—they are always calling out to him to come back and be with them, and know life, as they call it, and duck under to Experience. Now, to say nothing of living with such persons, it is almost impossible to talk with them. It isn't safe even to philosophise when they are around. If a man ventures the assertion in their presence that what a woman loves in a lover is complete subjugation they argue that either he is a fool and is asserting what he has not experienced, or he is still more of one and has experienced it. The idea that a man may have several principles around him that he has not used yet does not occur to them. The average amateur mother, when she belongs to this type, becomes a perfect bigot toward a maiden aunt who advances, perhaps, some harmless little Froebel idea. She swears by the shibboleth of experience, and every new baby she has makes her more disagreeable to people who have not had babies. The only way to get acquainted with her is to have a baby. She assumes that a motherless woman has a motherless mind. The idea that a rich and bountiful womanhood, which is saving its motherhood up, which is free from the absorption and the haste, keenly observant and sympathetic, may come to a kind of motherly insight, distinctly the result of not being experienced, does not occur to her. The art of getting the result—the spirit of experience, without paying all the cost of the experience itself—needs a good word spoken for it nowadays. Some one has yet to point out the value and power of what might be called The Maiden-Aunt Attitude toward Life. The world has had thousands of experienced young mothers for thousands of years—experienced out of their wits—piled up with experiences they don't know anything about; but, in the meantime, the most important contribution to the bringing-up of children in the world that has ever been known—the kindergarten—was thought of in the first place by a man who was never a mother, and has been developed entirely in the years that have followed since by maiden aunts.

The spiritual power and manifoldness and largeness which is the most informing quality of a really cultivated man comes from a certain refinement in him, a gift of knowing by tasting. He seems to have touched the spirits of a thousand experiences we know he never has had, and they seem to have left the souls of sorrows and joys in him. He lives in a kind of beautiful magnetic fellowship with all real life in the world. This is only possible by a sort of unconscious economy in the man's nature, a gift of not having to experience things.

Avoiding experience is one of the great creative arts of life. We shall have enough before we die. It is forced upon us. We cannot even select it, most of it. But, in so far as we can select it,—in one's reading, for instance,—it behooves a man to avoid experience. He at least wants to avoid experience enough to have time to stop and think about the experience he has; to be sure he is getting as much out of his experience as it is worth.

III

On Having One's Experience Done Out

"But how can one avoid an experience?"

By heading it off with a principle. Principles are a lot of other people's experiences, in a convenient form a man can carry around with him, to keep off his own experiences with.

No other rule for economising knowledge can quite take the place, it seems to me, of reading for principles. It economises for a man both ways at once. It not only makes it possible for a man to have the whole human race working out his life for him, instead of having to do it all himself, but it makes it possible for him to read anything he likes, to get something out of almost anything he does not like, which he is obliged to read. If a man has a habit of reading for principles, for the law behind everything, he cannot miss it. He cannot help learning things, even from people who don't know them.

The other evening when The P. G. S. of M. came into my study, he saw the morning paper lying unopened on the settle by the fireplace.

"Haven't you read this yet?" he said.

"No, not to-day."

"Where are you, anyway? Why not?"

I said I hadn't felt up to it yet, didn't feel profound enough—something to that effect.

The P. G. S. of M. thinks a newspaper should be read in ten minutes. He looked over at me with a sort of slow, pitying, Boston-Public-Library expression he has sometimes.

I behaved as well as I could—took no notice for a minute.

"The fact is, I have changed," I said, "about papers and some things. I have times of thinking I'm improved considerably," I added recklessly.