Phaethon - Charles Kingsley
PHAETHON; LOOSE THOUGHTS FOR LOOSE THINKERS. 1852.
Templeton and I were lounging by the clear limestone stream which
crossed his park and wound away round wooded hills toward the
distant Severn. A lovelier fishing morning sportsman never saw. A
soft gray under-roof of cloud slid on before a soft west wind, and
here and there a stray gleam of sunlight shot into the vale across
the purple mountain-tops, and awoke into busy life the denizens of
the water, already quickened by the mysterious electric influences
of the last night's thunder-shower. The long-winged cinnamon-flies
spun and fluttered over the pools; the sand-bees hummed merrily
round their burrows in the marly bank; and delicate iridescent
ephemerae rose by hundreds from the depths, and, dropping their
shells, floated away, each a tiny Venus Anadyomene, down the glassy
ripples of the reaches. Every moment a heavy splash beneath some
overhanging tuft of milfoil or water hemlock proclaimed the death-
doom of a hapless beetle who had dropped into the stream beneath;
yet still we fished and fished, and caught nothing, and seemed
utterly careless about catching anything; till the old keeper who
followed us, sighing and shrugging his shoulders, broke forth into
open remonstrance:
"Excuse my liberty, gentlemen, but what ever is the matter with you
and master, sir? I never did see you miss so many honest rises
before."
"It is too true," said Templeton to me with a laugh. "I must
confess I have been dreaming instead of fishing the whole morning.
But what has happened to you, who are not as apt as I am to do
nothing by trying to do two things at once?"
"My hand may well be somewhat unsteady; for to tell the truth, I sat
up all last night writing."
"A hopeful preparation for a day's fishing in limestone water! But
what can have set you on writing all night after so busy and
talkative an evening as the last, ending too, as it did, somewhere
about half-past twelve?"
"Perhaps the said talkative evening itself; and I suspect, if you
will confess the truth, you will say that your morning's meditations
are running very much in the same channel."
"Lewis," said he, after a pause, "go up to the hall, and bring some
luncheon for us down to the lower waterfall."
"And a wheelbarrow to carry home the fish, sir?"
"If you wish to warm yourself, certainly. And now, my good fellow,"
said he, as the old keeper toddled away up the park, "I will open my
heart-a process for which I have but few opportunities here-to an
old college friend. I am disturbed and saddened by last night's
talk and by last night's guest."
"By the American professor? How, in the name of English
exclusiveness, did such a rampantly heterodox spiritual guerilla
invade the respectabilities and conservatisms of Herefordshire?"
"He was returning from a tour through Wales, and had introductions
to me from some Manchester friends of mine, to avail himself of
which I found he had gone some thirty miles out of his way."
"Complimentary to you, at least."
"To Lady Jane, I suspect, rather than to me; for he told me broadly
enough that all the flattering attentions which he had received in
Manchester-where, you know, all such prophets are received with open
arms, their only credentials being that, whatsoever they believe,
they shall not believe the Bible-had not given him the pleasure
which he had received from that one introduction to what he called
'the inner hearth-life of the English landed aristocracy.' But what
did you think of him?"
"Do you really wish to know?"
"I do."
"Then, honestly, I never heard so much magniloquent unwisdom talked
in the same space of time. It was the sense of shame for my race
which kept me silent all the evening. I could not trust myself to
argue with a gray-haired Saxon man, whose fifty years of life seemed
to have left him a child in all but the childlike heart which alone
can enter into the kingdom of heaven."
"You are severe," said Templeton, smilingly though, as if his
estimate were not very different from mine.
"Can one help being severe when one hears irreverence poured forth
from reverend lips? I do not mean merely irreverence for the
Catholic Creeds; that to my mind-God forgive me if I misjudge him-
seemed to me only one fruit of a deep root of irreverence for all
things as they are, even for all things as they seem. Did you not
remark the audacious contempt for all ages but 'our glorious
nineteenth century,' and the still deeper contempt for all in the
said glorious time who dared to believe that there was any
ascertained truth independent of the private fancy and opinion of-
for I am afraid it came to that-him, Professor Windrush, and his
circle of elect souls? 'You may believe nothing if you like, and
welcome; but if you do take to that unnecessary act, you are a fool
if you believe anything but what I believe-though I do not choose to
state what that is.' Is not that, now, a pretty fair formulisation
of his doctrine?"
"But, my dear raver," said Templeton, laughing, "the man believed at
least in physical science. I am sure we heard enough about its
triumphs."
"It may be so. But to me his very 'spiritualism' seemed more
materialistic than his physics. His notion seemed to be, though
heaven forbid that I should say that he ever put it formally before
himself-"
"Or anything else," said Templeton, sotto voce.
"-that it is the spiritual world which is governed by physical laws,
and the physical by spiritual ones; that while men and women are
merely the puppets of cerebrations and mentations, and attractions
and repulsions, it is the trees, and stones, and gases, who have the
wills and the energies, and the faiths and the virtues and the
personalities."
"You are caricaturing."
"How so? How can I judge otherwise, when I hear a man talking, as
he did, of God in terms which, every one of them involved what we
call the essential properties of matter-space, time, passibility,
motion; setting forth phrenology and mesmerism as the great organs
of education, even of the regeneration of mankind; apologising for
the earlier ravings of the Poughkeepsie seer, and considering his
later eclectico-pantheist farragos as great utterances: while,
whenever he talked of Nature, he showed the most credulous craving
after everything which we, the countrymen of Bacon, have been taught
to consider unscientific-Homoeopathy, Electro-biology, Loves of the
Plants a la Darwin, Vestiges of Creation, Vegetarianisms,
Teetotalisms-never mind what, provided it was unaccredited or
condemned by regularly educated men of science?"
"But you don't mean to assert that there is nothing in any of these
theories?"
"Of course not. I can no more prove a universal negative about them
than I can about the existence of life on the moon. But I do say
that this contempt for that which has been already discovered-this
carelessness about induction from the normal phenomena, coupled with
this hankering after theories built upon exceptional ones-this
craving for 'signs and wonders,' which is the sure accompaniment of
a dying faith in God, and in nature as God's work-are symptoms which
make me tremble for the fate of physical as well as of spiritual
science, both in America and in the Americanists here at home. As
the Professor talked on, I could not help thinking of the neo-
Platonists of Alexandria, and their exactly similar course-downward
from a spiritualism of notions and emotions, which in every term
confessed its own materialism, to the fearful discovery that
consciousness does not reveal God, not even matter, but only its own
existence; and then onward, in desperate search after something
external wherein to trust, towards theurgic fetish worship, and the
secret virtues of gems and flowers and stars; and, last of all, to
the lowest depth of bowing statues and winking pictures. The sixth
century saw that career, Templeton; the nineteenth may see it re-
enacted, with only these differences, that the Nature-worship which
seems coming will be all the more crushing and slavish, because we
know so much better how vast and glorious Nature is; and that the
superstitions will be more clumsy and foolish in proportion as our
Saxon brain is less acute and discursive, and our education less
severely scientific, than those of the old Greeks."
"Silence, raver!" cried Templeton, throwing himself on the grass in
fits of laughter. "So the Professor's grandchildren will have
either turned Papists, or be bowing down before rusty locomotives
and broken electric telegraphs? But, my good friend, you surely do
not take Professor Windrush for a fair sample of the great American
people?"
"God forbid that so unpractical a talker should be a sample of the
most practical people upon earth. The Americans have their
engineers, their geographers, their astronomers, their scientific
chemists; few indeed, but such as bid fair to rival those of any
nation upon earth. But these, like other true workers, hold their
tongues and do their business."
"And they have a few indigenous authors too: you must have read the
'Biglow Papers,' and the 'Fable for Critics,' and last but not
least, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'?"
"Yes; and I have had far less fear for Americans since I read that
book; for it showed me that there was right healthy power, artistic
as well as intellectual, among them, even now-ready, when their
present borrowed peacocks' feathers have fallen off, to come forth
and prove that the Yankee Eagle is a right gallant bird, if he will
but trust to his own natural plumage."
"And they have a few statesmen also."
"But they are curt, plain-spoken, practical-in everything antipodal
to the knot of hapless men, who, unable from some defect or
morbidity to help on the real movement of their nation, are fain to
get their bread with tongue and pen, by retailing to 'silly women,'
'ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth,'
second-hand German eclecticisms, now exploded even in the country
where they arose, and the very froth and scum of the Medea's
caldron, in which the disjecta membra of old Calvinism are pitiably
seething."
"Ah! It has been always the plan, you know, in England, as well as
in America, courteously to avoid taking up a German theory till the
Germans had quite done with it, and thrown it away for something
new. But what are we to say of those who are trying to introduce
into England these very Americanised Germanisms, as the only
teaching which can suit the needs of the old world?"
"We will, if we are in a vulgar humour, apply to them a certain old
proverb about teaching one's grandmother a certain simple operation
on the egg of the domestic fowl; but we will no less take shame to
ourselves, as sons of Alma Mater, that such nonsense can get even a
day's hearing, either among the daughters of Manchester
manufacturers, or among London working men. Had we taught them what
we were taught in the schools, Templeton-"
"Alas, my friend, we must ourselves have learnt it first. I have no
right to throw stones at the poor Professor, for I could not answer
him."
"Do not suppose that I can either. All I say is-mankind has not
lived in vain. Least of all has it lived in vain during the last
eighteen hundred years. It has gained something of eternal truth in
every age, and that which it has gained is as fresh and young now as
ever; and I will not throw away the bird in the hand for any number
of birds in the bush."
"Especially when you suspect most of them to be only wooden
pheasants, set up to delude poachers. Well, you are far more of a
Philister and a Conservative than I thought you."
"The New is coming, I doubt not; but it must grow organically out of
the Old-not root the old up, and stick itself full-grown into the
place thereof, like a French tree of liberty-sure of much the same
fate. Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid
already, in spiritual things or in physical; as the Professor and
his school will surely find."
"You recollect to whom the Bible applies that text?"
"I do."
"And yet you say you cannot answer the Professor?"
"I do not care to do so. There are certain root-truths which I
know, because they have been discovered and settled for ages; and
instead of accepting the challenge of every I-know-not-whom to re-
examine them, and begin the world's work all over again, I will test
his theories by them; and if they fail to coincide, I will hear no
more speech about the details of the branches and flowers, for I
shall know the root is rotten."
"But he, too, acknowledged certain of those root-truths," said
Templeton, who seemed to have a lingering sympathy with my victim;
"he insisted most strongly, and spoke, you will not deny, eloquently
and nobly on the Unity of the Deity."
"On the non-Trinity of _it_, rather; for I will not degrade the word
'Him,' by applying it here. But, tell me honestly-c'est le timbre
qui fait la musique-did his 'Unity of the Deity' sound in your
English Bible-bred heart at all like that ancient, human, personal
'Hear, O Israel! the Lord thy God is one Lord'?"
"Much more like 'The Something our Nothing is one Something.'"
"May we not suspect, then, that his notion of the 'Unity of the
Deity' does not quite coincide with the foundation already laid,
whosesoever else may?"
"You are assuming rather hastily."
"Perhaps I may prove also, some day or other. Do you think,
moreover, that the theory which he so boldly started, when his
nerves and his manners were relieved from the unwonted pressure by
Lady Jane and the ladies going upstairs, was part of the same old
foundation?"
"Which, then?"
"That, if a man does but believe a thing, he has a right to speak it
and act on it, right or wrong. Have you forgotten his vindication
of your friend, the radical voter, and his 'spirit of truth'?"
"What, the worthy who, when I canvassed him as the Liberal candidate
for ---, and promised to support complete freedom of religious
opinion, tested me by breaking out into such blasphemous ribaldry as
made me run out of the house, and then went and voted against me as
a bigot?"
"I mean him, of course. The Professor really seemed to admire the
man, as a more brave and conscientious hero than himself. I am not
squeamish, as you know; but I am afraid that I was quite rude to him
when he went as far as that."
"What-when you told him that you thought that, after all, the old
theory of the Divine Right of Kings was as plausible as the new
theory of the Divine Right of Blasphemy? My dear fellow, do not
fret yourself on that point. He seemed to take it rather as a
compliment to his own audacity, and whispered to me that 'The Divine
Right of Blasphemy' was an expression of which Theodore Parker
himself need not have been ashamed."
"He was pleased to be complimentary. But, tell me, what was it in
his oratory which has so vexed the soul of the country squire?"
"That very argument of his, among many things. I saw, or rather
felt, that he was wrong; and yet, as I have said already, I could
not answer him; and, had he not been my guest, should have got
thoroughly cross with him, as a pis-aller."
"I saw it. But, my friend, used we not to read Plato together, and
enjoy him together, in old Cambridge days? Do you not think that
Socrates might at all events have driven the Professor into a
corner?"
"He might: but I cannot. Is that, then, what you were writing
about all last night?"
"It was. I could not help, when I went out on the terrace to smoke
my last cigar, fancying to myself how Socrates might have seemed to
set you, and the Professor, and that warm-hearted, right-headed,
wrong-tongued High-Church Curate, all together by the ears, and made
confusion worse confounded for the time being, and yet have left for
each of you some hint whereby you might see the darling truth for
which you were barking, all the more clearly in the light of the one
which you were howling down."
"And so you sat up, and-I thought the corridor smelt somewhat of
smoke."
"Forgive, and I will confess. I wrote a dialogue;-and here it is,
if you choose to hear it. If there are a few passages, or even
many, which Plato would not have written, you will consider my age
and inexperience, and forgive."
"My dear fellow, you forget that I, like you, have been ten years
away from dear old Alma-Mater, Plato, the boats, and Potton Wood.
My authorities now are 'Morton on Soils' and 'Miles on the Horse's
Foot.' Read on, fearless of my criticisms. Here is the waterfall;
we will settle ourselves on Jane's favourite seat. You shall
discourse, and I, till Lewis brings the luncheon, will smoke my
cigar; and if I seem to be looking at the mountain, don't fancy that
I am only counting how many young grouse those heath-burning
worthies will have left me by the twelfth."
So we sat down, and I began:
PHAETHON
Alcibiades and I walked into the Pnyx early the other morning,
before the people assembled. There we saw Socrates standing, having
his face turned toward the rising sun. Approaching him, we
perceived that he was praying; and that so ardently, that we touched
him on the shoulder before he became aware of our presence.
"You seem like a man filled with the God, Socrates," said
Alcibiades.
"Would that were true," answered he, "both of me and of all who will
counsel here this day. In fact, I was praying for that very thing;
namely, that they might have light to see the truth, in whatsoever
matter might be discussed here."
"And for me also?" said Alcibiades; "but I have prepared my speech
already."
"And for you also, if you desire it-even though some of your periods
should be spoiled thereby. But why are you both here so early,
before any business is stirring?"
"We were discussing," said I, "that very thing for which we found
you praying-namely, truth, and what it might be."
"Perhaps you went a worse way toward discovering it than I did. But
let us hear. Whence did the discussion arise?"
"From something," said Alcibiades, "which Protagoras said in his
lecture yesterday-How truth was what each man troweth, or believeth,
to be true. 'So that,' he said, 'one thing is true to me, if I
believe it true, and another opposite thing to you, if you believe
that opposite. For,' continued he, 'there is an objective and a
subjective truth; the former, doubtless, one and absolute, and
contained in the nature of each thing; but the other manifold and
relative, varying with the faculties of each perceiver thereof.'
But as each man's faculties, he said, were different from his
neighbour's, and all more or less imperfect, it was impossible that
the absolute objective truth of anything could be seen by any
mortal, but only some partial approximation, and, as it were, sketch
of it, according as the object was represented with more or less
refraction on the mirror of his subjectivity. And therefore, as the
true inquirer deals only with the possible, and lets the impossible
go, it was the business of the wise man, shunning the search after
absolute truth as an impious attempt of the Titans to scale Olympus,
to busy himself humbly and practically with subjective truth, and
with those methods-rhetoric, for instance-by which he can make the
subjective opinions of others either similar to his own, or, leaving
them as they are-for it may be very often unnecessary to change
them-useful to his own ends."
Then Socrates, laughing:
"My fine fellow, you will have made more than one oration in the
Pnyx to-day. And indeed, I myself felt quite exalted, and rapt
aloft, like Bellerophon on Pegasus, upon the eloquence of Protagoras
and you. But yet forgive me this one thing; for my mother bare me,
as you know, a man-midwife, after her own trade, and not a sage."
ALCIBIADES. "What then?"
SOCRATES. "This, my astonishing friend-for really I am altogether
astonished and struck dumb, as I always am whensoever I hear a
brilliant talker like you discourse concerning objectivities and
subjectivities, and such mysterious words; at such moments I am like
an old war-horse, who, though he will rush on levelled lances,
shudders and sweats with terror at a boy rattling pebbles in a
bladder; and I feel altogether dizzy, and dread lest I should suffer
some such transformation as Scylla, when I hear awful words, like
incantations, pronounced over me, of which I, being no sage,
understand nothing. But tell me now, Alcibiades, did the opinion of
Protagoras altogether please you?"
A. "Why not? Is it not certain that two equally honest men may
differ in their opinions on the same matter?"
S. "Undeniable."
A. "But if each is equally sincere in speaking what he believes, is
not each equally moved by the spirit of truth?"
S. "You seem to have been lately initiated, and that not at Eleusis
merely, nor in the Cabiria, but rather in some Persian or Babylonian
mysteries, when you discourse thus of spirits. But you, Phaethon"
(turning to me), "how did you like the periods of Protagoras?"
"Do not ask me, Socrates," said I, "for indeed we have fought a
weary battle together ever since sundown last night, and all that I
had to say I learnt from you."
S. "From me, good fellow?"
PHAETHON. "Yes, indeed. I seemed to have heard from you that truth
is simply 'facts as they are.' But when I urged this on Alcibiades,
his arguments seemed superior to mine."
A. "But I have been telling him, drunk and sober, that it is my
opinion also as to what truth is. Only I, with Protagoras,
distinguish between objective fact and subjective opinion."
S. "Doing rightly, too, fair youth. But how comes it then that you
and Phaethon cannot agree?"
"That," said I, "you know better than either of us."
"You seem both of you," said Socrates, "to be, as usual, in the
family way. Shall I exercise my profession on you?"
"No, by Zeus!" answered Alcibiades, laughing; "I fear thee, thou
juggler, lest I suffer once again the same fate with the woman in
the myth, and after I have conceived a fair man-child, and, as I
fancy, brought it forth; thou hold up to the people some dead puppy,
or log, or what not, and cry: 'Look what Alcibiades has produced!'"
S. "But, beautiful youth, before I can do that, you will have
spoken your oration on the bema, and all the people will be ready
and able to say 'Absurd! Nothing but what is fair can come from so
fair a body.' Come, let us consider the question together."
I assented willingly; and Alcibiades, mincing and pouting, after his
fashion, still was loath to refuse.
S. "Let us see, then. Alcibiades distinguishes, he says, between
objective fact and subjective opinion?"
A. "Of course I do."
S. "But not, I presume, between objective truth and subjective
truth, whereof Protagoras spoke?"
A. "What trap are you laying now? I distinguish between them also,
of course."
S. "Tell me, then, dear youth, of your indulgence, what they are;
for I am shamefully ignorant on the matter."
A. "Why, do they not call a thing objectively true, when it is true
absolutely in itself; but subjectively true, when it is true in the
belief of a particular person?"
S. "-Though not necessarily true objectively, that is, absolutely
and in itself?"
A. "No."
S. "But possibly true so?"
A. "Of course."
S. "Now, tell me-a thing is objectively true, is it not, when it is
a fact as it is?"
A. "Yes."
S. "And when it is a fact as it is not, it is objectively false;
for such a fact would not be true absolutely, and in itself, would
it?"
A. "Of course not."
S. "Such a fact would be, therefore, no fact, and nothing."
A. "Why so?"
S. "Because, if a thing exists, it can only exist as it is, not as
it is not; at least my opinion inclines that way."
"Certainly not," said I; "why do you haggle so, Alcibiades?"
S. "Fair and softly, Phaethon! How do you know that he is not
fighting for wife and child, and the altars of his gods? But if he
will agree with you and me, he will confess that a thing which is
objectively false does not exist at all, and is nothing."
A. "I suppose it is necessary to do so. But I know whither you are
struggling."
S. "To this, dear youth, that, therefore, if a thing subjectively
true be also objectively false, it does not exist, and is nothing."
"It is so," said I.
S. "Let us, then, let nothing go its own way, while we go on ours
with that which is only objectively true, lest coming to a river
over which it is subjectively true to us that there is a bridge, and
trying to walk over that work of our own mind, but no one's hands,
the bridge prove to be objectively false, and we, walking over the
bank into the water, be set free from that which is subjectively on
the farther bank of Styx."
Then I, laughing: "This hardly coincides, Alcibiades, with
Protagoras's opinion, that subjective truth was alone useful."
"But rather proves," said Socrates, "that undiluted draughts of it
are of a hurtful and poisonous nature, and require to be tempered
with somewhat of objective truth, before it is safe to use them-at
least in the case of bridges."