The Complete Essays (94 page)

[A] When their natural teeth are missing, women use false ones made of ivory; they replace their real complexion by one contrived from
borrowed materials; they pad out their thighs with cloth or felt, round out their bellies with cotton-wool and, as everyone knows and sees, enhance themselves with a false and borrowed beauty.

Learning does the same; [B] even our system of Law, they say, bases the truth of its justice upon legal fictions. Learning pays us in the coin of suppositions which she confesses she has invented herself. Those eccentric and concentric epicycles by which Astrology tries to make sense out of the motions of the heavenly bodies are presented to us merely as the best she can produce; all Philosophy does the same, presenting us not with what really is, nor even with what she believes to be true, but with the best probabilities and elegancy she has wrought.
²⁶⁹
[C] Take Plato, explaining the attributes of the bodies of men and beasts, ‘We would be certain that what we say is true, if we could have it confirmed by an oracle; as it is, we can only be certain that I have spoken with the greatest appearance of truth that I can find.’
²⁷⁰

[A] Philosophy does not only impose her ropes, wheels and contrivances on to the high heavens. Just think for a while what she says about the way we humans are constructed. For our tiny bodies she has forged as many retrogradations, trepidations, conjunctions, recessions and revolutions as she has for the stars and the planets. They are right to call our bodies
Microcosms
(‘little worlds’) seeing all the various pieces and angles they need to build them up and cement them together. To house all the activities which they find in Man and all the various functions and faculties which we are aware of within us, think of all the sections into which they have subdivided our souls and how many organs they have ascribed to them; think of all the storeys and levels and all the duties and activities they have assigned to us, over and above the natural ones which our poor humanity can actually perceive! They have invented an entire Republic! Man is an object to be seized and handled. Each philosopher, according to his fancy, has been left entirely free to unstitch him, rearrange him, put him together again and furnish him out afresh.

Yet even now they have not overmastered him. They cannot even dream up an ordinance for Man – let alone find out a true one – without there being some sound or cadence which they cannot quite fit in, however
abnormal
²⁷¹
they make their contrivance and however much they try and botch it up with a thousand false and fantastical patches. [C] It is wrong to find excuses for them. We do indeed condone artists who represent the sky and far-off lands, seas, mountains or islands with a few slight brush-strokes; we do not know what they are like so are happy with the shadowy imitations that they feign; but when they paint from nature on a known subject – one which we are familiar with – we require of them a perfect, detailed representation of the lines and colours. If they fail, we despise them.
²⁷²

[A] I have always felt grateful to that girl from Miletus who, seeing the local philosopher Thales with his eyes staring upwards, constantly occupied in contemplating the vault of heaven, made him trip over, to warn him that it was time enough to occupy his thoughts with things above the clouds when he had accounted for everything lying before his feet. It was certainly good advice she gave him, to study himself rather than the sky; [C] for, as Democritus says through the mouth of Cicero,
‘Quod est ante pedes, nemo spectat: coeli scrutantur plagas’
[Nobody examines what is before his feet: they scrutinize the tracts of the heavens].

[A] But in fact, the human condition is such that, where our understanding is concerned, the things we hold in our hands are as far above the clouds as the heavenly bodies are! [C] As Socrates says in Plato, you can make against anyone concerned with Philosophy exactly the same reproach as that woman made against Thales: he fails to see what lies before his feet. No philosopher understands his neighbour’s actions nor even his own; he does not even know what either of them is in himself, beast or Man.
²⁷³

[A] These people, now, who find Sebond’s arguments to be too feeble, these know-alls who are ignorant of nothing and make rules for the whole Universe –

Quae mare compescant causae; quid temperet annum;
Stellae sponte sua jussaeve vagentur et errent;
Quid premat obscurum lunae, quid proferat orbem;
Quid velit et possit rerum concordia discors;

[What limits the seas to their confines, what regulates the years: whether the heavenly bodies travel and wander freely or by constraint; what makes the dark
orb of the Moon to wax or wane, or what the discordant concord of all things can mean or bring about]
²⁷⁴
–

have they never, among all their books, plumbed the difficulties which confront them in understanding their own being? Some things can be seen easily enough: our finger and foot are capable of motion; some of our members move on their own while others move only when we make them do so; certain impressions produce a blush, others pallor; some thoughts act on the spleen, others on the brain; some make us laugh, others weep; some stun our minds into ecstasies and arrest the movements of our limbs; [C] there are objects which make our gorges rise, others which raise up something lower down. [A] But no man has yet discovered how purely mental impressions like these can effect such deep incursions into objects as massively solid as our bodies nor the nature of the linking sutures by which these astonishing stimuli are transmitted: [C]
‘Omnia incerta ratione et in naturae majestate abdita’
[All things remain unknown to reason and are hidden in the majesty of Nature], says Pliny; and St Augustine:
‘Modus quo corporibus adhaerent spiritus, omnino mirus est, nec comprehendi ab homine potest: et hoc ipse homo est’
[How the spirit adheres to the body is entirely a matter of wonder and cannot be understood by Man; nevertheless this union of body and spirit is Man].
²⁷⁵

[A] And yet everybody knows the answer! Merely human opinions become accepted when derived from ancient beliefs, and are taken on authority and trust like religion or law! We parrot whatever opinions are commonly held, accepting them as truths, with all the paraphernalia of supporting arguments and proofs, as though they were something firm and solid; nobody tries to shake them; nobody tries to refute them. On the contrary, everybody vies with each other to plaster over the cracks and prop up received beliefs with all his powers of reason – a supple instrument which can be turned on the lathe into any shape at all. Thus the world is pickled in stupidity and brimming over with lies.

We do not doubt much, because commonly received notions are assayed by nobody. We never try to find out whether the roots are sound. We argue about the branches. We do not ask whether any statement is true, but what it has been taken to mean. We ask whether Galen said this or said that: we never ask whether he said anything valid.

It is understandable that this curb on our freedom of judgement and this tyranny over our beliefs should spread to include the universities and the
sciences: Aristotle is the god of scholastic science: it is heresy to discuss his commandments (as it once was to discuss those of Lycurgus in Sparta). What Aristotle taught is professed as law – yet like any other doctrine it may be false. Where the first principles of Nature are concerned I cannot see why I should not accept, as soon as the opinions of Aristotle, the ‘Ideas’ of Plato, the atoms of Epicurus, the plenum and vacuum of Leucippus and Democritus, the water of Thales, the infinity of Nature of Anaximander, or the aether of Diogenes, the numbers and symmetry of Pythagoras, the infinity of Parmenides, the Unity of Musaeus, the fire and water of Apollodorus, the homogeneous particles of Anaxagoras, the discord and concord of Empedocles, the fire of Heraclitus, or any other opinion drawn from the boundless confusion of judgement and doctrines produced by our fine human reason, with all its certainty and perspicuity, when it turns its attention to anything whatever.

Aristotle based the principles of Nature on three elements: matter, form and privation. Yet what is more silly than actually to make a vacuum into one of the causes of the production of material objects? Privation is a negative: what fanciful humour led Aristotle to make it the original cause of objects which actually exist? Yet, except as an exercise in logic, nobody dares to shake that belief. Nobody debates anything to increase doubt but only to defend the founding author of their school against outside objections; his authority marks the goal; beyond it, no further inquiry is permitted.
²⁷⁶

Base yourself on admitted postulates and you can build up any case you like; from the rules which order the original principles the remainder of your construction will follow on easily without self-contradiction.

This method allows us to bowl our arguments with the jack in view (and so be satisfied that our foundations are rational ones); before they even begin, our professors (like geometricians with their postulated axioms) establish such a hold over our beliefs that they can subsequently reach any conclusion they want. We give them our agreement and consent: they can then pull us this way and that way, spinning us about at will. Once we accept anyone’s postulates he becomes our professor and our god: for his foundations he will grab territory so ample and so easy that, if he so wishes, he will drag us up to the clouds. In the practice and business of scholarship we have accepted Pythagoras’ contention as legal tender: every
expert, he says, must be believed in his own speciality. So, for the meaning of words the logician turns to the grammarian; for the matter of his arguments the rhetorician borrows from the logician; the poet takes his rhythms from the musician; the geometer takes his propositions from the arithmetician; the metaphysicians make their foundations out of the conjectures of physics. For their principles, all branches of learning take admitted postulates, which restrain human judgement on every side. If you come up against the barrier behind which their error of principle is sheltering, they have an axiom ready on their lips: Never argue with those who deny first principles.
²⁷⁷
But there can be no first principles unless God has revealed them; all the rest – beginning, middle and end – is dream and vapour.

Whenever a case is fought from preliminary assumptions, to oppose it take the very axiom which is in dispute, reverse it and make that into your preliminary assumption. For any human assumption, any rhetorical proposition, has just as much authority as any other, unless a difference can be established by reason. So they must all be weighed in the balance – starting with general principles and any tyrannous ones. [C] To be convinced of certainty is certain evidence of madness and of extreme unsureness: no people are more insane or less philosophical than the ‘lovers of opinion’ whom Plato dubbed
philodoxoi
.
²⁷⁸
[A] We want to find out by reason whether fire is hot, whether snow is white, whether anything within our knowledge is hard or soft. There are ancient stories of the replies made to the man who doubted whether heat exists – they told him to jump into the fire – or to the one who doubted whether ice is cold – they told him to slip some into his bosom: but a reply like that is quite unworthy of the professed aims of philosophy. Philosophers could have spoken in this way only if they had left us in a state of nature, simply accepting external appearances as they offer themselves to our senses, or if they had left us to follow our basic appetites, governed only by such modes of being as we are born with. But they themselves have taught us to make judgements about the universe; they themselves have fed us with the notion that human reason is the Comptroller-General of everything within and without the
vault of heaven; they themselves say that it can embrace everything, do everything and is the means by which anything is known or understood. Such replies would be good among the Cannibals who live long and happy lives, in peace and tranquility, without the benefits of Aristotle’s precepts and without even knowing what the word ‘physics’ means. Perhaps such a reply could even be better and more firmly based than all the ones which philosophers owe to reason or discovery. Such arguments would be within the capacity of ourselves, of all the animals and of all for whom the pure and simple law of Nature still holds sway. But they themselves have renounced such arguments. They must not tell me: ‘This is true; you can see it is; you can feel it is.’ What they must tell me is whether I really and truly feel what I think I feel; and if I do feel it, they must go on and tell me why and how and what: let them tell me the name, origin, connections and frontiers of heat or of cold and what qualities are found in the agents and patients of heat and of cold. Otherwise, let them abandon their professional intention, which is to accept nothing and approve nothing except by following the ways of reason. When they have to assay anything, reason is their touchstone. But it is, a most surely, a touchstone full of falsehood, error, defects and feebleness. How better to test that than by reason itself. If we cannot trust reason when talking about itself, it can hardly be a judge of anything outside itself.

If human reason knows anything at all, it must be its own essence and its own domicile. It is domiciled within the soul, being either a part of it or one of its activities – as for the permanent home of that true and essential Reason, whose name we steal under false colours, it is in the bosom of God: that is the habitation where it dwells; that is where it comes from when it pleases God to allow us to have a glimmer of Reason, like Pallas leaping from the head of her Father to make herself known unto the world.