Is Life Worth Living?, William Hurrell Mallock [if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud txt] 📗

no peculiarity of his. It is characteristic of the whole school he belongs to; it is inherent in our whole modern positivism—the whole of our exact and enlightened thought. I merely choose Dr. Tyndall as my example, not because there is more confusion in his mind than there is in that of his fellow-physicists, but because he is, as it were, the enfant terrible of his family, who publicly lets out the secrets which the others are more careful to conceal.

But I have not done with this matter yet. We are here dealing with the central problem of things, and we must not leave it till we have made it as plain as possible. I will therefore re-state it in terms of another metaphor. Let us compare the universal matter, with its infinity of molecules, to a number of balls on a billiard-table, set in motion by the violent stroke of a cue. The balls at once begin to strike each other and rebound from the cushions at all angles and in all directions, and assume with regard to each other positions of every kind. At last six of them collide or cannon in a particular corner of the table, and thus group themselves so as to form a human brain; and their various changes thereafter, so long as the brain remains a brain, represent the various changes attendant on a man's conscious life. Now in this life let us take some moral crisis. Let us suppose the low desire to cling to some pleasing or comforting superstition is contending with the heroic desire to face the naked truth at all costs. The man in question is at first about to yield to the low desire. For a time there is a painful struggle in him. At last there is a sharp decisive pang; the heroic desire is the conqueror, the superstition is cast away, and 'though truth slay me,' says the man, 'yet will I trust in it.' Such is the aspect of the question when approached from one side. But what is it when approached from the other? The six billiard balls have simply changed their places. When they corresponded to low desire, they formed, let us say, an oval; when they corresponded to the heroic desire, they formed, let us say, a circle. Now what is the cause and what the conditions of this change? Clearly a certain impetus imparted to the balls, and certain fixed laws under which that impetus operates. The question is what laws and what impetus are these? Are they the same or not the same, now the balls correspond to consciousness, as they were before, when the balls did not correspond to it? One of two things must happen. Either the balls go on moving by exactly the same laws and forces they have always moved by, and are in the grasp of the same invincible necessity, or else there is some new and disturbing force in the midst of them, with which we have to reckon. But if consciousness is inseparable from matter, this cannot be. Do the billiard-balls when so grouped as to represent consciousness generate some second motive power distinct from, at variance with, and often stronger than, the original impetus? Clearly no scientific thinker can admit this. To do so would be to undermine the entire fabric of science, to contradict what is its first axiom and its last conclusion. If then the motion of our six billiard balls has anything, when it corresponds to consciousness, distinct in kind from what it always had, it can only derive this from one cause. That cause is a second cue, tampering with the balls and interfering with them, or even more than this—a second hand taking them up and arranging them arbitrarily in certain figures.

Science places the positive school on the horns of a dilemma. The mind or spirit is either arranged entirely by the molecules it is connected with, and these molecules move with the same automatic necessity that the earth moves with; or else these molecules are, partially at least, arranged by the mind or spirit. If we do not accept the former theory we must accept the latter: there is no third course open to us. If man is not an automaton, his consciousness is no mere function of any physical organ. It is an alien and disturbing element. Its impress on physical facts, its disturbance of physical laws, may be doubtless the only things through which we can perceive its existence; but it is as distinct from the things by which we can alone at present perceive it, as a hand unseen in the dark, that should arrest or change the course of a phosphorescent billiard-ball. Once let us deny even in the most qualified way that the mind in the most absolute way is a material machine, an automaton, and in that denial we are affirming a second and immaterial universe, independent of the material, and obeying different laws. But of this universe, if it exists, no natural proof can be given, because ex hypothesi it lies quite beyond the region of nature.

One theory then of man's life is that it is a union of two orders of things; another, that it is single, and belongs to only one. And of these theories—opposite, and mutually exclusive, Dr. Tyndall, and modern positivism with him, says 'I reject neither.'35

Now this statement of their position, if taken as they state it, is of course nonsense. It is impossible to consider matter as 'that mysterious something by which all that is is accomplished;' and then to solve the one chief riddle of things by a second mysterious something that is not material. Nor can we 'reject,' as the positivists say they do, an 'outside builder' of the world, and then claim the assistance of an outside orderer of the brain. The positivists would probably tell us that they do not do so, or that they do not mean to do so. And we may well believe them. Their fault is that they do not know what they mean. I will try to show them.

First, they mean something, with which, as I have said already, we may all agree. They mean that matter moving under certain laws (which may possibly be part and parcel of its own essence) combines after many changes into the human brain, every motion of which has its definite connection with consciousness, and its definite correspondence to some state of it. And this fact is a mystery, though it may be questioned if it be more mysterious why matter should think of itself, than why it should move of itself. At any rate, thus far we are all agreed; and whatever mystery we may be dealing with, it is one that leaves us in ignorance but not in doubt. The doubt comes in at the next step. We have then not to wonder at one fact, but, the mystery being in either case the same, to choose between two hypotheses. The first is that there is in consciousness one order of forces only, the second is that there are two. And when the positive school say that they reject neither of these, what they really mean to say is that as to the second they neither dare openly do one thing or the other—to deny it or accept it, but that they remain like an awkward child when offered some more pudding, blushing and looking down, and utterly unable to say either yes or no.

Now the question to ask the positive school is this. Why are they in this state of suspense? 'There is an iron strength in the logic,' as Dr. Tyndall himself says, that rejects the second order altogether. The hypothesis of its existence explains no fact of observation. The scheme of nature, if it cannot be wholly explained without it, can, at any rate, be explained better without it than with it. Indeed from the standpoint of the thinker who holds that all that is is matter, it seems a thing too superfluous, too unmeaning, to be even worth denial. And yet the positive school announce solemnly that they will not deny it. Now why is this? It is true that they cannot prove its non-existence; but this is no reason for professing a solemn uncertainty as to its existence. We cannot prove that each time a cab drives down Regent Street a stick of barley-sugar is not created in Sirius. But we do not proclaim, to the world our eternal ignorance as to whether or no this is so. Why then should our positivists treat in this way the alleged immaterial part of consciousness? Why this emphatic protestation on their part that there may exist a something which, as far as the needs of their science go, is superfluous, and as far as the logic of their science goes is impossible? The answer is plain. Though their science does not need it, the moral value of life does. As to that value they have certain foregone conclusions, which they cannot resolve to abandon, but which their science can make no room for. Two alternatives are offered them—to admit that life has not the meaning they thought it had, or that their system has not the completeness they thought it had; and of these two alternatives they will accept neither. They could tell us 'with an iron strength of logic' that all human sorrow was as involuntary and as unmeaning as sea-sickness; that love and faith were but distillations of what exists diluted in mutton-chops and beer; and that the voice of one crying in the wilderness was nothing but an automatic metamorphosis of the locusts and wild honey. They could tell us 'with an iron strength of logic' that all the thoughts and moral struggles of humanity were but as the clanging whirr of a machine, which if a little better adjusted might for the future go on spinning in silence. But they see that the discovery on man's part that his life was nothing more than this would mean a complete change in its mechanism, and that thenceforward its entire action would be different. They therefore seek a refuge in saying it may be more than this. But what do they mean by may be? Do they mean that in spite of all that science can teach them, in spite of that uniformity absolute and omnipresent which alone it reveals to them, which day by day it is forcing with more vividness on their imaginations, and which seems to have no room for anything besides itself—do they mean that in spite of this there may still be a second something, a power of a different order, acting on man's brain and grappling with its automatic movements? Do they mean that that 'heathen' and 'gross' conception of an immaterial soul is probably after all the true one? Either they must mean this or else they must mean the exact opposite. There is no third course open to them.36

Their opinion, as soon as they form one, must rest either on this extreme or that. They will see, as exact and scientific thinkers, that if it be not practically certain that there is some supernatural entity in us, it is practically certain that there is not one. To say merely that it may exist is but to put an ounce in one scale whilst there is a ton in the other. It is an admission that is utterly dead and meaningless. They can only entertain the question of its existence because its existence is essential to man as a moral being. The only reason that can tempt us to say it