Though many other causes will bring about such moral revaluations as I have mentioned, Intelligence will play its part in justifying them. But Intelligence will itself effectuate great changes, methinks, in the minor moral realm of intellectual manners. For instance, proscribing perfunctoriness; making us ashamed, which we are not, of offering in the guise of opinion much which we know to be stop-gap and shoddy. The condemnation of perfunctoriness will lead to discarding heckler’s tricks and dialectic pit-falls like that concerning the future status of the widow of seven successive husbands, wherewith the Sadducees, though disbelieving in any after-life at all, tried to trip up Jesus. His answer: that there would be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, may stand as the typical silencer to many queries with which debaters embarrass each other without advancing a step in the inquiry. For instance: “then, what do you propose to do?” Well! we may be intelligent enough to know that in nine cases out of ten there is nothing to propose. Since the more habitually we get to regard the Future as resulting from the Present and the Present from the Past, the more often we must admit that we know too little of the hidden Past, and less of the fleeting Present, to make sure what new combinations, including reciprocal neutralizations, are preparing to arise. The oftener we have watched the Old Man Proteus, the less, perhaps, our cocksureness about his next metamorphosis. Or, take another question which intellectual good breeding will refrain from because Intelligence foresees no answer: “In that case, what will you put in its place?” It being, let us say, indissoluble marriage, exclusive private ownership, war (you remember William James was, shortly before 1914, looking out for a surrogate!) or even what used to be called God, but may now be thankful when philosophers (like Mr. Lloyd Morgan) allow it merely adjectival rank as “Deity.” How do you know that it, whatever it is, will leave a place? Do we not daily see that, when things vanish, their place (place in the world, in our thoughts, and also, in our hearts!) are apt to vanish along with them and be forgotten? And among such things as may some day vanish and be forgotten there will, I trust, be the dialectic ju-jitsu which makes many pages even of Plato such dreary reading. Lacking, as the world then did, all discipline of experimental science, such acrobatics may have afforded an indispensable training to logical thought, and a preparation for that latest-comer of all intellectual habits: care for the exact sense in which a word is being employed. Apart, however, from this, controversy of this kind has but a personal value, adding nothing to knowledge, just as nothing is added to wealth when one gamester loses money to another: the personal value of downing an adversary and magnifying oneself by mere comparison, which may be reckoned in some distant Future an intellectual entertainment fit for cads.
Such are a few of the improvements one might foresee in our intellectual manners. Allied with these is one which appertains to our intellectual morals. In another book[2] I have written at some length against the survival of the lawyer’s and politician’s arts of Persuasion, and of the priestly arts of Exhortation and Denunciation, both sets of them intended to influence men to think, feel and act differently from how they would otherwise do, but in compliance with the persuasive person’s wishes. Some day or other such attempts may be accounted impertinent where they fail, and dishonest where they succeed; they and the sway of words should constitute a chapter of intellectual morals.
[2] The Handling of Words.
Returning to mere intellectual manners, I think intellectual prize fights, duels and vendettas, such as wasted half the life of the greatest intellects from Abélard to Samuel Butler, are a little going out of fashion, like the quarrels for precedence we read about in Herbert of Cherbury and such-like: they stop the traffic, make a noise and, after a minute, bore us! Moreover, I fancy I see a reason why, let alone mere spectators of such frays, even those who might have been principals in them will refrain and call them ill-mannered. I mean that, as people grow more intelligent, or more people grow intelligent at all, we shall discover other opportunities for exercising intellectual energy and for obtaining the thrill and uplift of intellectual prowess. There will appear other adversaries to wrestle with and circumvent: Things, Reasons why, the Universe’s riddles; not any longer mere other people trying to make us write ourselves down asses as we try to make them. The finest sport in all the world is hunting Proteus....
Nor will I let myself be heckled with the objection that joys like these are reserved for minds like yours and mine, dear reader, minds Creative.... As if books, pictures, policies, opinions, etc., etc., were created ex nihilo, obeying that august fiat which evolutional philosophy has filched from the old Creator of all things to bestow on every member of the Intelligentsia. No, no, the joys I speak of are unprofessional. And the chief creative joy is that of understanding and appreciating; say the joy of every deserving reader outrunning the straight path of the writer in circles like those of a dog pleased to be taken a walk.
Amateurishness! I can hear those of you pshah! and tosh! who believe in training the (involuntary) attention and who value work less by results than by efforts. Amateurish? Why, of course, that’s just the fun and the good of it. Also the unsought moral gain. For, are we not made more “decent” by these private, irresponsible dealings with the Unknown (at least to us); for instance, those secret inaccurate guesses at geological and historical riddles which make up half the pleasure of a journey? Since these amateurish stalkings of Proteus attain an attractiveness such that personal controversy seems insipid or odious by comparison.
I have had the good fortune once or twice, even in an old-fashioned lifetime, to witness the full flowering of such selfless intellectual happiness: to watch a mind so passionately interested in certain subjects as to care nothing whether the enchanting new ideas were its own or other folks’; nay, whether its own were by them confirmed or utterly demolished. I have seen that unusual spectacle, but once or twice only. For Intelligence has yet to establish its claim to such generous happiness. Once or twice only. But never more clearly have I seen it than in you, Mario Calderoni, dear dead young friend, who have embodied my hopes for the Intelligence of a distant Future, when you will not have received a posthumous recognition and I may be entirely forgotten.