VI—Reading for Feelings
I
The Passion of Truth
Reading resolves itself sooner or later into two elements in the reader’s mind:
1. Tables of facts. (a) Rows of raw fact; (b) Principles, spiritual or sum-total facts.
2. Feelings about the facts.
But the Man with the Scientific Method, who lives just around the corner from me, tells me that reading for feelings is quite out of the question for a scientific mind. It is foreign to the nature of knowledge to want knowledge for the feelings that go with it. Feelings get in the way.
I find it impossible not to admit that there is a certain force in this, but I notice that when the average small scientist, the man around the corner, for instance, says to me what he is always saying, “Science requires the elimination of feelings,”—says it to me in his usual chilled-through, ophidian, infallible way,—I never believe it, or at least I believe it very softly and do not let him know it. But when a large scientist, a man like Charles Darwin, makes a statement like this, I believe it as hard, I notice, as if I had made it all up myself. The statement that science requires the elimination of the feelings is true or not true, it seems to me, according to the size of the feelings. Considering what most men’s feelings are, a man like Darwin feels that they had better be eliminated. If a man’s feelings are small feelings, they are in the way in science, as a matter of course. If he has large noble ones, feelings that match the things that God has made, feelings that are free and daring, beautiful enough to belong with things that a God has made, he will have no trouble with them. It is the feelings in a great scientist which have always fired him into being a man of genius in his science, instead of a mere tool, or scoop, or human dredge of truth. All the great scientists show this firing-process down underneath, in their work. The idea that it is necessary for a scientific man to give up his human ideal, that it is necessary for him to be officially brutal, in his relation to nature, to become a professional nobody in order to get at truth, to make himself over into matter in order to understand matter, has not had a single great scientific achievement or conception to its credit. All great insight or genius in science is a passion of itself, a passion of worshipping real things. Science is a passion not only in its origin, but in its motive power and in its end. The real truth seems to be that the scientist of the greater sort is great, not by having no emotions, but by having disinterested emotions, by being large enough to have emotions on both sides and all sides, all held in subjection to the final emotion of truth. Having a disinterested, fair attitude in truth is not a matter of having no passions, but of having passions enough to go around. The temporary idea that a scientist cannot be scientific and emotional at once is based upon the experience of men who have never had emotions enough. Men whose emotions are slow and weak, who have one-sided or wavering emotions, find them inconvenient as a matter of course. The men who, like Charles Darwin or some larger Browning, have the passion of disinterestedness are those who are fitted to lead the human race, who are going to lead it along the paths of space and the footsteps of the worlds into the Great Presence.
The greatest astronomer or chemist is the man who glows with the joy of wrestling with God, of putting strength to strength.
To the geologist who goes groping about in stones, his whole life is a kind of mind-reading of the ground, a passion for getting underneath, for communing flesh to flesh with a planet. What he feels when he breaks a bit of rock is the whole round earth—the wonder of it—the great cinder floating through space. He would all but risk his life or sell his soul for a bit of lava. He is studying the phrenology of a star. All the other stars watch him. The feeling of being in a kind of eternal, invisible, infinite enterprise, of carrying out a world, of tracking a God, takes possession of him. He may not admit there is a God, in so many words, but his geology admits it. He devotes his whole life to appreciating a God, and the God takes the deed for the word, appreciates his appreciation, whether he does or not. If he says that he does not believe in a God, he merely means that he does not believe in Calvin’s God, or in the present dapper, familiar little God or the hero of the sermon last Sunday. All he means by not believing in a God is that his God has not been represented yet. In the meantime he and his geology go sternly, implacably on for thousands of years, while churches come and go. So does his God. His geology is his own ineradicable worship. His religion, his passion for the all, for communing through the part with the Whole, is merely called by the name of geology. In so far as a man’s geology is real to him, if he is after anything but a degree in it, or a thesis or a salary, his geology is an infinite passion taking possession of him, soul and body, carrying him along with it, sweeping him out with it into the great workroom, the flame and the glow of the world-shop of God.
It would not seem necessary to say it if it were not so stoutly denied, but living as we do, most of us, with a great flock of little scientists around us, pecking on the infinite most of them, each with his own little private strut, or blasphemy, bragging of a world without a God, it does seem as if it were going to be the great strategic event of the twentieth century, for all men, to get the sciences and the humanities together once more, if only in our own thoughts, to make ourselves believe as we must believe, after all, that it is humanity in a scientist, and not a kind of professional inhumanity in him, which makes him a scientist in the great sense—a seer of matter. The great scientist is a man who communes with matter, not around his human spirit, but through it.
The small scientist, violating nature inside himself to understand it outside himself, misses the point.
At all events if a man who has locked himself out of his own soul goes around the world and cannot find God’s in it, he does not prove anything. The man who finds a God proves quite as much. And he has his God besides.
II
Topical Point of View
If it is true that reading resolves itself sooner or later into two elements in the reader’s mind, tables of facts and feelings about the facts, that is, rows of raw fact, and spiritualised or related facts, several things follow. The most important of them is one’s definition of education. The man who can get the greatest amount of feeling out of the smallest number and the greatest variety of facts is the greatest and most educated man—comes nearest to living an infinite life. The purpose of education in books would seem to be to make every man as near to this great or semi-infinite man as he can be made.
If men were capable of becoming infinite by sitting in a library long enough, the education-problem would soon take care of itself. There is no front or side door to the infinite. It is all doors. And if the mere taking time enough would do it, one could read one’s way into the infinite as easily as if it were anything else. One can hardly miss it. One could begin anywhere. There would be nothing to do but to proceed at once to read all the facts and have all the feelings about the facts and enjoy them forever. The main difficulty one comes to, in being infinite, is that there is not time, but inasmuch as great men or semi-infinite men have all had to contend with this same difficulty quite as much as the rest of us, it would seem that in getting as many of the infinite facts, and having as many infinite feelings about the facts, as they do, great men must employ some principle of economy or selection, that common, that is, artificial men, are apt to overlook.
There seem to be two main principles of economy open to great men and to all of us, in the acquiring of knowledge. One of these, as has been suggested, may be called the scientist’s principle of economy, and the other the poet’s or artist’s. The main difference between the scientific and the artistic method of selection seems to be that the scientist does his selecting all at once and when he selects his career, and the artist makes selecting the entire business of every moment of his life. The scientist of the average sort begins by partitioning the universe off into topics. Having selected his topic and walled himself in with it, he develops it by walling the rest of the universe out. The poet (who is almost always a specialist also, a special kind of poet), having selected his specialty, develops it by letting all the universe in. He spends his time in making his life a cross section of the universe. The spirit of the whole of it, something of everything in it, is represented in everything he does. Whatever his specialty may be in poetry, painting, or literature, he produces an eternal result by massing the infinite and eternal into the result. He succeeds by bringing the universe to a point, by accumulating out of all things—himself. It is the tendency of the scientist to produce results by dividing the universe and by subdividing himself. Unless he is a very great scientist he accepts it as the logic of his method that he should do this. His individual results are small results and he makes himself professedly small to get them.
All questions with regard to the reading habit narrow themselves down at last: “Is the Book to be divided for the Man, or is the Man to be divided for the Book? Shall a man so read as to lose his soul in a subject, or shall he so read that the subject Loses itself in him—becomes a part of him?” The main fact about our present education is that it is the man who is getting lost. And not only is every man getting lost to himself, but all men are eagerly engaged in getting lost to each other. The dead level of intelligence, being a dead level in a literal sense, is a spiritless level—a mere grading down and grading up of appearances. In all that pertains to real knowledge of the things that people appear to know, greater heights and depths of difference in human lives are revealed to-day than in almost any age of the world. What with our steam-engines (machines for our hands and feet) and our sciences (machines for our souls) we have arrived at such an extraordinary division of labour, both of body and mind, that people of the same classes are farther apart than they used to be in different classes. Lawyers, for instance, are as different from one another as they used to be from ministers and doctors. Every new skill we come to and every new subdivision of skill marks the world off into pigeon-holes of existence, into huge, hopeless, separate divisions of humanity. We live in different elements, monsters of the sea wondering at the air, air-monsters peering curiously down into the sea, sailors on surfaces, trollers over other people’s worlds. We commune with each other with lines and hooks. Some of us on the rim of the earth spend all our days quarrelling over bits of the crust of it. Some of us burrow and live in the ground, and are as workers in mines. The sound of our voices to one another is as though they were not. They are as the sound of picks groping in rocks.
The reason that we are not able to produce or even to read a great literature is that a great book can never be written, in spirit at least, except to a whole human race. The final question with regard to every book that comes to a publisher to-day is what mine shall it be written in, which public shall it burrow for? A book that belongs to a whole human race, which cannot be classified or damned into smallness, would only be left by itself on the top of the ground in the sunlight. The next great book that comes will have to take a long trip, a kind of drummer’s route around life, from mind to mind, and now in one place and now another be let down through shafts to us. There is no whole human race. A book with even forty-man power in it goes begging for readers. The reader with more than one-, two-, or three-man power of reading scarcely exists. We shall know our great book when it comes by the fact that crowds of kinds of men will flock to the paragraphs in it, each kind to its own kind of paragraph. It will hardly be said to reach us, the book with forty-man power in it, until it has been broken up into fortieths of itself. When it has been written over again—broken off into forty books by forty men, none of them on speaking terms with each other—it shall be recognised in some dim way that it must have been a great book.
It is the first law of culture, in the highest sense, that it always begins and ends with the fact that a man is a man. Teaching the fact to a man that he can be a greater man is the shortest and most practical way of teaching him other facts. It is only by being a greater man, by raising his state of being to the nth power, that he can be made to see the other facts. The main attribute of the education of the future, in so far as it obtains to-day, is that it strikes both ways. It strikes in and makes a man mean something, and having made the man—the main fact—mean something, it strikes out through the man and makes all other facts mean something. It makes new facts, and old facts as good as new. It makes new worlds. All attempts to make a whole world without a single whole man anywhere to begin one out of are vain attempts. We are going to have great men again some time, but the science that attempts to build a civilisation in this twentieth century by subdividing such men as we already have mocks at itself. The devil is not a specialist and never will be. He is merely getting everybody else to be, as fast as he can.
It is safe to say in this present hour of subdivided men and sub-selected careers that any young man who shall deliberately set out at the beginning of his life to be interested, at any expense and at all hazards, in everything, in twenty or thirty years will have the field entirely to himself. It is true that he will have to run, what every more vital man has had to run, the supreme risk, the risk of being either a fool or a seer, a fool if he scatters himself into everything, a seer if he masses everything into himself. But when he succeeds at last he will find that for all practical purposes, as things are going to-day, he will have a monopoly of the universe, of the greatest force there is in it, the combining and melting and fusing force that brings all men and all ideas together, making the race one—a force which is the chief characteristic of every great period and of every great character that history has known.
It is obvious that whatever may be its dangers, the topical or scientific point of view in knowledge is one that the human race is not going to get along without, if it is to be master of the House it lives in. It is also obvious that the human or artistic, the man-point of view in knowledge is one that it is not going to get along without, if the House is to continue to have Men in it.
The question remains, the topical point of view and the artistic point of view both being necessary, how shall a man contrive in the present crowding of the world to read with both? Is there any principle in reading that fuses them both? And if there is, what is it?