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Title: Proteus
or, The future of intelligence
Author: Vernon Lee
Release date: September 14, 2024 [eBook #74416]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1925
Credits: Produced by Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROTEUS ***
PROTEUS
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES
_DÆDALUS, or Science and the Future_
By J. B. S. Haldane
_ICARUS, or The Future of Science_
By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST_
By F. G. Crookshank, M.D. _Fully Illustrated_
_WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES_
By Prof. A. M. Low. _With four Diagrams_
_NARCISSUS, or An Anatomy of Clothes_
By Gerald Heard. _Illustrated_
_TANTALUS, or The Future of Man_
By F. C. S. Schiller
_THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS_
By Prof. C. J. Patten, M.A., M.D., Sc.D., F.R.A.I.
_CALLINICUS, A Defense of Chemical Warfare_
By J. B. S. Haldane
_QUO VADIMUS? Some Glimpses of the Future_
By E. E. Fournier d’Albe, D.Sc., F.Inst.P.
_THE CONQUEST OF CANCER_
By H. W. S. Wright, M.S., F.R.C.S.
_HYPATIA, or Woman and Knowledge_
By Dora Russell (The Hon. Mrs. Bertrand Russell)
_LYSISTRATA, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman_
By A. M. Ludovici
_WHAT I BELIEVE_
By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_PERSEUS, or Of Dragons_
By H. F. Scott Stokes, M.A.
_THE FUTURE OF SEX_
By Rebecca West
_THE EVOCATION OF GENIUS_
By Alan Porter
_AESCULAPIUS, or Disease and The Man_
By F. G. Crookshank, M.D.
_PROTEUS, or The Future of Intelligence_
By Vernon Lee
_Other Volumes in Preparation_
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
PROTEUS
OR
THE FUTURE OF INTELLIGENCE
BY
VERNON LEE, LITT.D.
Author of _Vital Lies, Satan the Waster,
The Handling of Words, etc._
[Illustration]
New York
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
Copyright 1925
By E. P. Dutton & Company
_All Rights Reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
_To my dear friend
BELLA DUFFY
with thanks for a lifetime
of intelligent talk._
1880–1925
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I INTELLIGENCE AND PROTEUS 1
II PROTEUS AND ETHICS 25
III PROTEUS AND ÆSTHETICS 38
IV PROTEUS AND INTELLECTUAL MANNERS 42
V USES AND ABUSES 50
PROTEUS
OR
THE FUTURE OF INTELLIGENCE
I
INTELLIGENCE AND PROTEUS
There seems not to exist a word――for words are old while meanings
may be new――which answers exactly to what I shall speak of as
_Intelligence_. But space being short for what has to be said, I
will not waste any in preliminary definitions. That which I mean by
Intelligence will become evident by what I expect from its presence
and attribute to its absence. I start from the assumption that it
already exists, however insufficiently; and I deduce from what it has
done that its nature is to intensify and extend. Whether this will be
witnessed in the near future, or whether it may be checked by adverse
circumstances, is no concern of mine. Writers of this series, and
several others besides, have enlarged on the political and economic
contingencies to which Intelligence, or persons presumed to have it,
seem likely to be exposed. Whether Intelligence may become the weapon
of a dominant caste, as was the hope of Comte, of Renan, and, at one
moment, of Mr. H. G. Wells; or whether, as proposed by M. Charles
Maurras, Intelligence shall be honoured with a subordinate function in
some sort of Fascist State, I am inadequate to judge. Nor do I even
feel certain that history has shown, or economic theory demonstrated,
that Intelligence can be bullied or starved out of existence. Meanwhile
let me confess that what I have to say about the Future of Intelligence
is the expression as much of my hopes as of my convictions, both,
however, arising from a longish experience of changes already brought
about, and changes beginning to be brought about, by the particular,
and perhaps rather modern, something I mean by _Intelligence_. What
_I_ mean, and what, under restriction to that meaning, appears _to
me_ likely or desirable. By underlining these personal pronouns, I am
able to forestall the mention of one great change which Intelligence
is already initiating, namely, the recognition and avowal that what
one thinks (as distinguished from what primers, manuals and other
authorities have taught one to believe) is――well, _just what one does
think_, and neither the consensus of human opinion nor the revelation
of the Deity’s irrefragable truth.
Returning to the word _Intelligence_, the meaning I attach to it will
become sooner obvious by clearing away some misconceptions thereof
which may occur to my reader. And first: The Intelligence whose future
interests me is not the same thing as the _Intelligentsia_. Those of
us who belong to that class presumably possess _Intelligence_, since
we live, or try to live, by its exercise. But it is no monopoly of
ours, nor do we always employ it in the manner which answers to my
meaning. For living on or by its employment may, as is often seen
among men of science and philosophers, result in their capital of
natural Intelligence being sunk in a few enterprises of especial value,
leaving them, as in the notorious case of Dr. Faust, but a scanty
balance for current use and pleasure. I have brought in the word
_pleasure_ because the pleasantness of its varied exercise is one of
the chief characteristics of what I mean by _Intelligence_, fostering
that nimbleness, elasticity, hence also pervasiveness, which makes
it a chief factor of human progress, as well as one of progressive
mankind’s indisputable marks and unalienable rewards. Now these same
pleasant properties, so often sacrificed by very studious persons,
turn Intelligence into the stock-in-trade (eked out with plentiful
surrogates) of that other branch of the _Intelligentsia_, those who
make a livelihood by living down to their readers, relieving their
boredom, lapping their thick skins in sentimentality, and keeping up
the sooty flame of their collective passions; for alas, the Man of
Letters is tempted to serve his public not merely as an unconsidered
jester but as a respected moral guide.
Thus it comes about that we of the _Intelligentsia_ cannot stand
as faultless specimens of Intelligence. Besides, our facility for
self-expression and our habit of holding forth unchecked combine to
exaggerate, stereotype and warp our best ideas: only think of Carlyle
and Ruskin, let alone Tolstoy and Nietzsche!
Having so far established what I do _not_ mean by Intelligence, and
before entering on discussion of Intelligence’s future achievements, it
seems fitting to say a word or two about Proteus, to whom this little
treatise is consecrated. It is so, I confess, partly because I am
attracted by the classical titles, _Dædalus_, _Icarus_, _Tantalus_, of
my predecessors, and then because, as described by Virgil, Proteus is
to me one of the most engaging figures of mythology: ... “Ille, suae
contra non immemor artis, omnia transformat sese in miracula rerum,
ignemque, horribilem feram, fluviumque liquentem....”
But here again I must forestall another wrong identification likely
to jump into the reader’s mind: to wit, of Proteus with Intelligence.
On the contrary: Proteus, multiform and ever-elusive, represents that
which Intelligence (lighter equipped than specialized Intellect for
such rapid hunts) can sometimes catch sight of and, for however brief
a contact, sometimes even clutch. Proteus, in my mythology, is the
mysterious whole which we know must exist, but know not how to descry:
Reality. For, whatever else we may believe it to be, Reality when thus
partially revealed, is never twice the same. Nor merely because of
what we call waxing and waning, growth and decay, and whatever other
phases of individual and racial transformation biology has made us
superficially familiar with. There may well be some πάντα ῤεῖ outside
and irrespective of our thoughts; indeed, it may have been in miming
the universal flux that our thoughts themselves have grown _protean_.
Look, for instance, at that strange (well named _auxiliary_) verb
whereby we testify belief in reality, _esse_, _to be_; which holds
in its emptiness the possibility of all qualities and happenings and
implies in its assertion of mere blank existence the assurance of
continual change: a future and past. For, whenever we speak of what we
call a _thing_, its mere name, like the name of Virgil’s Proteus, is
a spell making us witness aspect after aspect, take stock of relation
after relation, admit likelihood after likelihood. And our belief in
that thing’s reality, in its being _that thing_ and no other, means
that it has had a certain, however unknown; past, and will have a more
or less certain future. In this sense _Reality_, the fact of aspects
perceived, remembered and expected in regularly connected sequences and
combinations, _that_ is what I mean by Proteus. Maybe that Proteus does
not change at all except in our narrow, and shifting, field of vision.
Maybe that the multiform Virgilian Proteus might turn out to undergo
but one first and last transformation, into that great auxiliary
_esse_, _to be_, holding in its stark emptiness all that, for us, is
things and happenings.... Such a transcendent and sole real Reality I
leave to metaphysicians, not without wondering secretly whence, save
from occasional experience of this (to them) unreal Proteus, they ever
got to think about Reality at all.
So, dealing in this shallow treatise solely with such (even if
spurious) Reality as Proteus represents, I need now only justify
my outrageous claim that mere Intelligence can have any privileged
intercourse therewith. My ground for saying so is that specialized
intellect screws its marvellous lenses down on only a single, and
_singled out_, aspect of Reality; employs subtle reagents revealing
only the properties for which they have been devised. Moreover, that
the world of regular, foretellable sequences which science constructs
is a map teaching us why to turn to the right or the left, but not a
moving slice of the landscape we are moving in. Instead of which mere
Intelligence, with its rule-of-thumb logic and well-nigh automatic
movements, may be fairly fitted, not indeed to inventory and schedule
separate items of Proteus’ multifold embodiments, but to keep us aware
that Proteus is there at that eternal game of his: changing his aspects
perpetually, whether you watch him or not, nay, changing aspect by the
very fact of your watching him.
This may suggest that Intelligence is never at rest; and no more it is.
But its movements being responsive to what strikes it from outside,
are, just as the outside’s own ways, orderly, and such as organize
themselves into regular rhythms of sameness and diversity. For Proteus
is absolutely unexpected only to persons like Virgil’s Aristæus who,
you must remember, was so hide-bound in his business of _h_oney-making
(alter one letter, you won’t alter my meaning!) as to be wholly unaware
that his own caddish behaviour had occasioned the death of Eurydice
and so remarkable an event as the Descent of Orpheus into Hell.
Practical people like that are nearly always astonished and dismayed
when confronted with Proteus; “they had forgotten....” Now Intelligence
is as much memory as perception; and for it there is always in the
transformations it is watching something familiar which carries it
back to what it has already witnessed, and forwards, expectantly, to
something it may be going to witness. Hence to Intelligence there is
never mere repetition, just as there is never utter novelty. And its
frequent doubts are always conditioned by its habitual beliefs. That
explains why Intelligence is so chock-full of prejudices, as all those
are aware who have ever asked it to accept miracles and ghosts on
their testimony or on someone else’s authority. Such people exclaim
at the sceptic’s blindness to evidence, because they do not know that
doubting and even denying are part of Intelligence’s active rhythm of
grasping and acquiescing; a process of assimilation and elimination
in which the already experienced and accepted selects that which
shall be accepted or rejected. Moreover, such selective action often
expresses itself in the most impertinent (because most pertinent)
queries, as: “Now how would you explain that?” “In what sense are you
using that word?” etc., etc., etc. Queries, all of them, which in
their exasperating amateurishness have probably done more than the
elaborate arguments of specialized Intellect to shoo away some of the
many Chimæras, Entities, and Essences, which, as Rabelais already
remarked, had gone on _bombinating in vacuo_ through the resounding
spaciousness of philosophy and science, leaving behind only the fainter
buzz of _Historical and Economic Laws_, _Entelechies_, _Teleologies_
and _Vital Elans_. It was, I take it, Intelligence which first scoffed
in Molière’s play at opium’s _Virtus Dormitiva_....
At this point a parenthesis must be opened on account of a reader
asking, not impertinently, whether what I have been talking of under
the name of Intelligence is not plain _Common Sense_. Yes; but also
_No_. Since, on behalf of practicality, Common Sense usually warns us
off from just such questions as Intelligence should deal with. So one
might say that Intelligence is a kind of Common Sense, but applied to
uncommon (not common or garden!) subjects, and as yet, alas, only by
rather uncommon people.
If Proteus be taken to represent that Reality which all save
metaphysicians believe to be real, he represents especially that half
of it which I have (elsewhere) called _Otherness_, that is to say,
whatever is not _ourself_. And just as the essential, unshareable
_ourself_ is what we feel, to wit: moods, passions, efforts, hope
and fear, liking and disliking; so the _not-ourself_ (other persons
as well as other things, and even our own personalities when viewed
as if they were not our own)――the _Otherness_ in short, is, on the
contrary, _seen_, because it is outside us. Seen by the mental eye of
Intelligence, which, like the bodily one, moves in every direction and
focuses to all distances, thereby informing us of the proportions and
relations of whatever is not ourself, and following step by step the
actions which are not our own. And though it must borrow the lenses
of Science (which centuries of thinkers cut and polished) before it
can know things in their microscopic detail or their astronomical
remoteness, yet with no aid save everyday experience, Intelligence
suffices to teach us the most important and most overlooked fact
concerning that Reality which is _Otherness_: namely, that it has ways
of its own and does not exist merely to suit our likings.
The habit of taking “otherness” into account, and a wider and wider
circle thereof, might serve as a rough test of Intelligence and of
its progress: young children, as is notorious, referring everything
to themselves; and “uneducated” people, from the narrowness of their
knowledge, rarely conceiving anything beyond their own personal
experience. At the risk of incurring the same criticism, I hazard
my own impression that the dominance of possessive pronouns,
the restriction of interest to one’s own history and circle of
acquaintances, has become less usual among “educated” persons.
Similarly, that there is getting to be something rather old-fashioned
about settling general questions on the strength of single personal
experiences. Except where strong likes and dislikes come into play,
it is rarer than formerly to hear (shall we say?) divorce condemned
because of the sad case of Mrs. Blank; or the eight-hours day rejected
on account of last harvest having been soaked; or the practical utility
of a classical education justified by the career of Mr. Gladstone.
Modes of thought like this seem to be (slowly!) disappearing in the
wake of the anecdote-mongering and epigram-and-joke button-holing
of ancient bores who may have been brilliant conversationalists at
Meredithian dinner-tables. And when one thinks of it: was not such
the substance of much of our grandparents’ wit and wisdom? Nay, a
little further back did not “gentlemen” ask the ladies riddles after
themselves exchanging smutty _Joe Millers_ over their wine? And
behold! there opens up a vista of euphuism, of pedantic discussions,
of “sonnet, c’est un sonnet,” of “deliciæ eruditorum,” and “facetiæ”;
boredom incalculable back through Hôtels de Rambouillets and
Medicean academies to Courts of Love and the stale scurrilities of
Shakespearian clowns.... Nay, was not Shakespeare himself ready to
adorn with supremest poetry and philosophy stories often preposterously
cock-and-bull? Which makes one suspect that Intelligence, in the sense
in which I have been using the word, is of amazingly recent growth;
and that the people of the past, superior though they may have been
in genius, wit, humour, and even wisdom, would have struck us (and we
shall doubtless strike future generations) as decidedly stupid.
For instance (returning to Proteus!), in their capacity of _thinking
in terms of change_. This seems an _intrinsic part of thinking in
terms of otherness_; yet, as, a fact, it dates only from the days of
Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon and Condorcet. This last name brings home
that until the eighteenth century the only Future which people thought
about was the Future in Heaven or Hell. The importance of the latter
alternative explains quite sufficiently why no interest was left over
for any other after-life, to wit, that of unborn generations. Indeed,
the sway of religious conceptions accounts also for our ancestors
having been no less cut off from the Past and replacing it (as their
painters dressed Abraham or Cæsar in Renaissance costume) by the
Present. For all religion tends to think _sub specie æternitatis_,
as of the god who is sacrificed afresh at every celebration, and who
consecrates the routine of the seasons and the seasonal monotony of
agriculture and pastoral life; whence, no doubt, the persistence of the
amazing fallacy _that there is nothing new under the sun_, with its
corollary that there ought to be nothing not _old_. Whence also the
double superstition (till Science broke in with something different!)
of chewing and rechewing the cud of Scripture and the Classics. With,
in turn, the practical results that Milton’s Puritans modelled
themselves on Joshua and Gideon; and frilled and waistcoated French
Revolutionaries postured as heroes of Plutarch. Why, at this very
moment do we not see the rods and axes of antique hangmen figuring (not
merely in figurative manner!) as emblems of post-war Italy, itself
identified (to the neglect of schools and irrigation works) with a
particularly high and palmy Rome? Rome! to rule which squalid mediæval
village Dante called on a _Cæsar_ who was a _Kaiser_ elected by German
feudatories; Rome, which we may take as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of
the refusal to realize that Past is Past and Present is Present. Which
is perhaps the only “Lesson of History”; and whose application would
dissolve many mythical alloys of conflicting nations welded together
by the passionate white-heat of a name: England, France, America,
Christianity, and nowadays, I fear, also Socialism, nations, and
creeds concerning which, when asked for our allegiance, we have need
to inquire: In which of its phases, which of its characteristics and
embodiments?
For Intelligence warns us that we are dealing with Proteus, with him of
ceaseless change. Not with the eternal, immutable divinities to whom
our forebears brought their sometimes quaint and lovely, but, quite as
often, obscene and grisly oblations.
But while ignoring distinctions between Past and Present, even our
nearer ancestors conducted much of their thinking in elaborate
water-tight compartments; for they conceived of “Truth” as a battleship,
continually exposed to the murderous broadsides of “Error.” Of these
hermetic partitions, say, between _Faith_ and _Reason_, _Body_ and
_Soul_, or _Good_ and _Evil_, Intelligence has already rammed in a
number, without drowning us. _Error_ itself has lost its capital E,
being usually called _Mistake_. And, what is more important, we have
begun to notice that it and _Truth_ are not at all irreconcilable, but
cradled originally together, and sometimes intermarrying, with mixed or
alternating generations, as by Mendelian rules; but very rarely, either
Truth or Error, affording us a pure breed.
These examples will have justified, I trust, my contention that
Intelligence is specially fitted to deal with Change. Not to praise or
blame it after mature deliberation, like solemn and sedentary Reason;
still less to filter concrete realities into immutable, because purely
abstract, entities, which is the business of scientific thought; but
just to perceive change on its passage and in so far help us to make
the best of its coming.
Need one add that Intelligence is far more liable to mistakes than
either “Reason” or “Logic”? But its mistakes, though so much more
numerous, are, methinks, less massively enthroned and less likely to
block the way than theirs, for there is something self-satisfied and
without appeal about “Reason” and “Logic”: does not the one issue
“dictates” and the other enunciate “laws”? Whereas the mistakes which
Intelligence commits to-day, it will, in its light-hearted way, correct
to-morrow, being as little ashamed of revokes as its disconcerting
friend Proteus is of transformations. Of course, Intelligence _is_
rather irresponsible and, one might add, cannot help being so because
it is essentially _responsive_. Like the human eye (to which I have
compared it) Intelligence turns to whichever side the light comes from,
adjusting itself, in discursive, often desultory fashion, to all manner
of directions and distances, comparing and measuring with unabashed
slovenliness, extracting the qualities which strike it and hastening
on to connect them with something it was struck by before. Being thus
rapidly responsive, Intelligence may often, I admit, seem _on the
pounce_, and more so than politeness warrants. But it can also take
its time, poise circling round and round, and reverse its movement,
because it is never motionless and always able to readjust its balance.
Such do I see Intelligence in those who possess it; such do I feel it,
on some delightful occasions, in myself. Such also I frequently notice
it failing to make itself agreeable to some kinds of persons. Those
who take a just pride in Reason or Logic are often a little ruffled;
or else, as Wagner said of Mozart, they find Intelligence just a
little _frivol_. But in the long run they recognize an ally; and their
conscious superiority makes them indulgent. Not so with people――I might
have said Peoples――who happen to be indulging in the glorious unimpeded
violence of collective passions, specially those which are magnanimous
and cruel, as, for instance, in war time, when a conscientious objector
may come off better than an intelligent one.
In like fashion Intelligence’s passionate pleasure in dealing with
_Otherness_ and in looking out for Proteus, Intelligence’s frequent
indifference to _here_ and _now_, disrespect to _self_ and refusal
to regard _means_ as _ends_――all this renders it unpopular with
those practical-minded men who are bent on personal advantage and on
outstripping competitors in the great race to _Nowhere_. These acute
persons are quite aware that Intelligence might make an invaluable
slave, only you cannot keep its nose, with any regularity, to the
grindstone. In default of such practical usefulness it may be worth
hiring, as one buys a yacht or an old master, for a mark of wealth
and being in the know. But let us have none of your _whys_ and
_wherefores_! Besides, the Rulers of Men have by this time mostly
recognized that Intelligence is harder to deal with than any number of
High Principles, for you cannot hope to bamboozle it into serving you
unawares.
But Intelligence, though thus in some quarters deservedly unpopular
is adored by all who have it; and that is the reason why, once it has
got a footing in the world, it is bound to increase and multiply and
eventually conquer its promised land.
II
PROTEUS AND ETHICS
I have just come across a passage from Huxley’s famous _Romanes
Lecture_, read thirty years ago and long since forgotten; and which
has brought home to me all our elusive Proteus has been doing in the
domain of ethics; moreover the share of Intelligence in confirming
those changes. Huxley is pointing out a fact which he finds
disconcerting, namely, “that ethical nature, while born of cosmic
nature, is necessarily at enmity with its parent.” The allusion to
the harmony reigning in Victorian families may make one smile, like
some well-bred Du Maurier illustration. But how those words bring back
what some of us are old enough to have suffered in days when Free
Thought drew a terrifying line between religious dogmas and moral
ones, clinging to these to steady itself after jettisoning the others!
One’s youthful deistic anguish (as cruel, perhaps, as any believer’s
sense of God’s forsaking him) at discarding God for insufficient
morality, was merely transferred to one’s terms with Huxley’s ogre
Cosmos, devouring the moral instincts itself had begotten. Occupied
as my studies then were with art-history, I can remember wrestling
with the horrid inconsistency of the art of Michael Angelo and Rafael
having arisen in a civilization described by Taine as partaking of
the brothel and the cut-throat’s den. And I remember the heavenly
relief of hitting on the notion that, since such art is not born in a
day, it must have been begotten and incubated during the Franciscan
Age, immune from all Borgian infections. Of course, the generation
immediately younger than mine was taught by Nietzsche that Michael
Angelo’s greatness was, on the contrary, due to presiding Renaissance
villainy; but that pseudo-Nietzschian generation is, in its turn,
superannuated, and the cult of _immoralism_ along with it. Not only
because paradoxes do not bear repetition, but for another reason which
that quotation from Huxley has made me realize. Namely, that we have
left off thinking of art as either moral or immoral, simply because
morality no longer holds the same place in our thoughts as, say, in
those of Ruskin, George Eliot, or, as that quotation shows, even in
those of Huxley. Not the same (if one may say so, _ubiquitous_) place;
a place more clearly defined, but only the more important, ever since
Intelligence, ferreting about among _Golden Boughs_, _Religion of
the Semites_, and similar books, has quietly stripped from our moral
valuations that half-supernatural, half-æsthetic halo which is but the
shrunken religious involucrum wherein they came into the world. The
“problem of evil” has already become the problem not of its toleration
by God, but of its diminution by Man. _That_ is the great change we
are still witnessing; a change, I cannot but think, greater than any
brought about by the material applications of science, and implying
a deliverance from individual suffering not less than that we owe to
Pasteur and to Lister.
Whether we notice it or not, Morality is already taking a new status,
independent alike of an absentee (or absent) Deity, and of an
indifferent Cosmos. But its new domain, narrow and self-governing,
essentially _sui generis_, has sanctions and imperatives only the
stronger for being man-made and man-regarding. And, one may add, only
the more austerely binding on the present that we shall recognize them
as different from those of the Past and different, no doubt, from those
into which the Future will transform them.
Thus we are already conceiving of punishment only as a mechanism,
successful or not, for social defence. And we scarcely ever hear
more than the last echo of those incentives to virtue and deterrents
from vice of the _Sandford and Merton_ type of my own childhood’s
copybooks. Still less of the Stoical, and (alas!) Platonic mendacities
about remorse torturing evil-doers, and the unhappy life of Browning’s
_Instans Tyrannus_ with his “Then _I_ was afraid.” Neither do we talk
any longer of the virtuous glows which (failing the increase of flocks
and herds!) used to reward the virtuous acts of the generation adorned
by Butler’s Mr. Pontifex. We are getting to think of our own virtues,
supposing we have any, as conducive not to our own advantage but to
that of other folk.
Consonantly with the psychologist’s recognition that, of the two
polar feelings determining human action, the (positive) attraction of
pleasure is far less potent than the (negative) repulsion of pain, it
seems as if our future ethics would emphasize not good actions but
bad ones. That will be following up the rule-of-thumb wisdom of the
Commandments, of which the surviving ones are all “thou _shalt not_”;
the positive ones about loving God and honouring Father and Mother
having become either difficult to enforce or optional. I am glad of
that word _optional_, because it leads to the remark that Intelligence
is surely abolishing that neutral territory whence “good actions” can
issue at “good” people’s good pleasure and as an expression of their
goodness, but which no one has a right to insist upon; indeed, which
they have a perfect right to withhold, since they are patted on the
back for doing them, or have their hands kissed, as children were
taught to kiss those of the “revered author of their being.” I expect
that before so very long Intelligence may bluntly suggest that if the
action, whatever it happen to be, is _really good_, that must mean that
it is _really needed_; and if it is really needed, your fellow men can
claim it and oblige you to claim it from your unwilling self. And to
dishonour that claim may become in their eyes (mirrored in your own),
mean, disgraceful, dirty. In the language of contemporary youth, it
will not be _decent_.[1] That substitution of the word _decency_ for
the word _virtue_ gives, methinks, the clue to the future revaluation
of our moral standards. It implies, as I have suggested, a more
intelligent and, in some ways, more indulgent, morality; but a morality
on the whole more austere, a stark notion of duty armed with the
relentless imperative which nowadays makes us abashed at the revelation
in ourself of physical cowardice or bodily dirtiness. A morality, I
venture to add, eventually able to do without the adornments coming
under the head of “Moral Beauty.”
[1] “No, we may not be as moral as they (_i.e._ the older generation)
are, but we are fifty times decenter.”――G. B. Stern, _Tents of
Israel_, 1924; p. 244.
And, speaking of a future standard of “decency,” there will necessarily
come sundry revaluations quite intolerable to our present morality.
I will not speak (since far too much is nowadays being spoken
concerning what, after all, is but a small part of conduct) about
such revaluations of sexual morals as _Dædalus_ prognosticates from
transplantation of ovaries. _That_, and coming facilitations for
changing one’s sex, cannot, indeed, fail to modify family arrangements;
although I have greater belief in the effects of future methods of
producing and exchanging, not offspring, but other commodities, and
the consequent alteration in our tenure and conception of property.
Indissoluble marriage, which already strikes some of us as scarcely
decent, will lose its practical utility once inheritance is more
or less abolished, and the subsistence and education of children
no longer a charge on parents. Nor is this all: a more restricted
practice and therefore habitual notion of ownership may at some
distant day educate men and women, parents and children, lovers and
friends, nay, masters and disciples, to admit Proteus even into the
impregnable stronghold and inviolable sanctuary of human selfishness
called _Love_. The “marriage of true minds” may, like the other one,
come to be supplemented by honourable divorce. Exclusive reciprocal
attachment, surely of all spiritual essences the most delicate, if not
most volatile, may cease to be regarded as an inalienable piece of
property, guaranteed by honour more terrible than law; and which, while
all else (and ourselves most!) alters and shifts, cannot be altered and
shifted without guilt of theft. There may come an end to the ideal of
such fidelity as implies the claim of him or her once preferred to be
preferred for ever; the duty also of continuing to prefer once having
begun. Like much of the morality of a more intelligent age, “decent”
behaviour in matters of sentiment will be based less upon an _ought_
than an _is_. And I can conceive that such a change may make love’s
tenure less insecure and less routinish and perfunctory. It will, at
least, save one of the finest kinds of happiness (and the multiplying
factor of many other ones) not indeed from the passing misery of
change, but from the ignominy of claimed or accepted sacrifice, and the
cruel pollution of jealousy, not between lovers only, but between all
who love. And when there shall be applied to love the solemn saying
“the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” we may learn to temper our
loss by the intenser gratitude for whatever, even if only for a time,
has been ours.
As with fidelity in love, so also with “loyalty” to persons, even
to causes and ideas. But such, too often degrading, loyalty will, I
imagine, be more than compensated for by the condemnation of a new sin
against the Holy Ghost, and by insistence on a minimum (at least!) of
consistency in one’s own ideas and a minimum of conformity between
one’s judgment of others and one’s judgment of oneself: the mote in
one’s brother’s eye awakening the suspicion of the beam in one’s own.
At the same time (which is not our time!), and as Intelligence takes
on a leading part in morals, there will come the indulgent recognition
that such a “decency” as we may exact (or try to exact) from ourselves,
cannot, any more than personal cleanliness in our own day, be exacted
from all our neighbours. It may take a good many transformations of
Proteus before the mote can always be removed from our brother’s eye,
even supposing the beam to have been taken away from our own. It is no
easy matter to be always clean inside and out, especially when, like
the little boy in Stevenson’s rhyme, “your dear Papa is poor,” poor
in spirit, perchance one of a long line of moral paupers. Neither is
“decency” always attainable where there has been no past charwoman to
prepare your easy tidiness at expense of previous dirty hands. Still
less when, as nowadays, wallowing in excess or in cruelty is the only
excitement many people can get out of life. Hence it may be a long
while yet before the bare decencies of the spirit, even if recognized
for such, can lose the value of rarity and the status of virtues. For,
let us remember that, the fouler mankind’s surroundings and sores, the
greater the need for incense and myrrh and even for the questionable
odour of sanctity. Is not early Christianity’s, say St. Paul’s,
insistence on chastity and mansuetude the expression of the otherwise
inexpressible bestiality, cruelty, and vaingloriousness of decadent
Rome? And what is the foolish Franciscan laudation of beggary save the
measure of mediæval rapine and simony?
So, for the time being and the world as it may, alas! long continue,
mankind will need something besides a taste for moral decency, to wit,
an admiration for generous, nay, quixotic impulses and for tender
sensibilities. These Intelligence, respectful towards the need for
them, can neither create, nor, except by negative measures, even
increase. But it can do something as necessary. Intelligence, and only
Intelligence, can see to it that, even to-day, such rare and precious
impulses and sensibilities be not diverted to evil results, wasted in
barren self-sacrifice, or the fostering of hide-bound selfishness.
Wasted, above all, in hecatombs to the Molochs of collective
superstition, like the one which is only just over, and may begin again
to-morrow.
III
PROTEUS AND ÆSTHETICS
“If there be any truth in these forecasts of what your fine Intelligence
may bring about or justify in the domain of ethics, then” (it’s a
certain kind of reader interrupting), “then may I never enter, nay, cast
a glance into this detestable world of rationalized righteousness!
_Human_ do you call it, because you have made it godless? What is this
Intelligence of yours worth if it fails to perceive that God exists
because Man has need of Him; and that the true mission of virtue, of
truth, of heroism, is not to make the world more endurable, but to
satisfy our deepest human craving, that for greater harmony and
loveliness, for deeper, steadier passion than otherwise life affords?”
My answer is that such a craving will become stronger, or at least
wider-spread, in proportion as mankind grows more intelligent,
therefore less exhausted by struggling against adverse circumstances,
inbred defects and inherited superstitions. In proportion, likewise, as
it will have learned to value its own virtues as they can minister to
man’s prosperity and betterment. Nay, more: the time will come when we
shall turn with disgust and wrath at their cultivation for any other
purpose; and when pleasure in virtue and in heroism for its own sake
may come to be accounted so much æsthetic dilettantism, questionable
and well-nigh obsolete. For with the orientation of morals towards
human usefulness, towards dutifulness conceived as decency, people
will get to understand that what man craves for as consolation and
enhancement, the passion deeper and steadier, the harmony more complete
than real life furnishes, Man creates for himself in poetry and art,
and in the things of reality seen as poetry and art. In all this he
has made himself a realm where truth is never betrayed, because in its
sheer existence _true_ and _false_ become words without a meaning;
moreover, where the deepest and highest passions are satisfied without
being misapplied or wasted, because satisfied by their mere expression.
Art and whatever the poor word _Art_ may stand for――is the man-made
sanctuary of the legitimate, the innocent, the immaculately _decent_,
because it is closed to the shifting _needs_, the partial truths, above
all, the _mine_ and _thine_, which trouble real life. This, in its way,
is also a realm of _otherness_, inasmuch as it transcends the self with
its _here_ and its _now_. Yet an _otherwise_ not merely recognized
by Intelligence, but made by the heart’s desire out of the heart’s
own substance and in desire’s own shape; for of such are the forms of
the painter and sculptor, no less than the counterfeit presentments
of the poet. Above all, in the twin arts of architecture and of
music do we already meet the clarified embodiment of the longing and
clinging, the solemn appeasement and victorious stress and fulfilment
of human passion. Here, in art’s interludes of life, we can obtain
what religious creeds lay open to the reproach of being false because
they give it for true; and what love seeks to make unchanging, only
to taste the bitterness of change. So that many as have been and will
be the successive responses to our æsthetic cravings, the manifold
satisfactions thereof, embodying as they do the purified essence of
our feelings and activities, will, in the endless shifting of our
valuations, perhaps constitute the one region where we need not be
watching for Proteus.
IV
PROTEUS AND INTELLECTUAL MANNERS
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.
V
USES AND ABUSES
Considering the great pleasantness, let alone the various uses, of the
mental habits I have summed up as _Intelligence_, it is surprising
there should not yet be more of it forthcoming. It has, at present,
a way of giving out suddenly in individuals and nations, just when
its mixture of light-hearted scepticism and steady hopefulness would
seem most needed. By which inadequacy of its supply I am confirmed
in the suspicion that Intelligence is a much more recent human
accomplishment than the Past’s other achievements in art and poetry
and wit and humour would lead us to expect. Indeed, the deserved
prestige of that Past, and the consequent survival of its educational
and religious traditions and institutions, is very likely what has
so strangely delayed the advent of modern Intelligence. And it is
their dwindling, itself partly attributable to nascent Intelligence,
which has delivered our intellectual activities from sundry blind
alleys and sloughs of despond, like those presided over by the
terrible, and most unintelligent, word _Salvation_. For Intelligence,
one of whose virtues is abolishing Fear, is itself stifled by the
obsession of danger in this world or the next: are we not seeing the
most naturally intelligent of all countries fallen into incredible
self-defeating stupidity through its present mania for “Security”? It
is, of course, evident that, apart from the decay of religious and
classical superstition, the growth of Intelligence in our own days has
been enormously fostered by increase both of scientific knowledge and
of civic liberty, and also, as far as it goes, of well-being; also of
opportunities for variety of impression at least for the well-to-do
classes. And one hopes there may be other kinds of yet unforeseen
novelties coming to Intelligence’s assistance in the Future. Yet, the
chief obstacles once removed, my hope is chiefly in what one might
call Intelligence’s own natural proliferation. One intelligent mode
of thought inevitably leads to another, and puts out of action an
unintelligent one. Every intelligent book adds, let us hope, to the
intelligence of at least one reader; so that we could almost do without
the tremendous launchings-forth of the great challengers, Ruskin,
Tolstoy, Ibsen, Nietzsche; even of the more purely beneficent (because
lighter-hearted) stirrers-up of thought like Bernard Shaw.
Believing, therefore, in such spontaneous multiplication of
Intelligence, I do not find much use for the methods, whereof that
one is but an extreme example which is attributed to the late Dr.
Metchnikoff, proposing (it is said) to increase the output of genius
by judicious doses of syphilitic virus. Surely, the supply of raw
genius would be fairly adequate if only we could put it to the best
use? And the best use of genius is not, in my opinion, the practical
application of science to methods of reciprocal slaughter and
devastation. Nor even its application to easier locomotion, intercourse
and the cheapening of food, heat and light, except to the extent which
would secure more health, more leisure and more opportunity all round;
certainly at present not the case. And, speaking for myself, the best
use of genius and the most necessary application of science, seems to
be teaching people what Descartes called (whatever his precise meaning)
the _méthode de bien conduire son esprit_; at least to the slight
degree of not letting obsolete shibboleths and new-fangled catchwords
carry us, as they did ten years ago, headlong into the disasters we
were trying to avoid.
The next best thing to be done with our existing supply of genius
might be to train it to check, by application of common sense and a
little modesty, certain ailments inherent in its own constitution,
namely: exaggeration, contrariness and, of course, megalomania. Such
self-purification, on the part of persons of genius or what passes for
such, would save the rest of us the disheartening task of throwing
half of their sayings onto the scrap-heap, and of picking out of the
scrap-heap some of the sayings of rival persons of genius consigned
thereunto at their bidding. There is quite enough to be done in the way
of selection, assimilation and elimination (since all understanding
means that) without setting such Intelligence as we have to play
scavenger to wasteful or slatternly genius.... And yet, and yet....
May not those trashinesses of genius, and the scavengering entailed
thereby, be that which secures to Intelligence its highest activities,
and in so far fulfils one of Genius’s chief missions? For, after all,
Intelligence is the living, changing mass of unprofessional thought,
the averaged, habitual thought of the majority of us. And is not the
chief use of all such genius as is not set aside in science or in art,
rather to make the rest of us think, than to furnish us with ready-made
thoughts, however true or sublime? Nay, I would hazard the supposition
that it was because the men of the Past were presented with such a mass
of ready-made thoughts, creeds, philosophies, and moral formulæ (think
of _Deuteronomy_!) all given for perfect and definitively valid, that
there did not appear till so late in the day just what I have called
_Intelligence_, which alone could give that without which the greatest
genius is solitary and barren: an audience, a reader, a mind able to
carry on the thinking and, in so far, able to eliminate the deciduous,
the rubbishy elements of the thought already offered to it.
The consideration of this loss which mankind may have suffered
through the notion that thoughts must be accepted ready-made rather
than transformed into one’s own, and that, consequently, men must be
set apart to do the thinking (as the priests once did the praying
and sacrificing) for others; this consideration is at the bottom
of my present hatred of the idea (which I shared in my youth) that
exceptionally gifted persons should consecrate themselves into a caste,
ministers, maybe, of a new religion, chosen vessels for a new-fangled
deity.
And since we are discussing the reciprocal uses of Genius and of mere
Intelligence (Genius ever stimulating Intelligence, Intelligence ever
keeping Genius within the bounds of sense and of decency), allow me to
set my face against all those oligarchies of genius and virtue which
every Utopian philosopher from Plato to Comte, from Renan to H. G.
Wells, has wanted to foist on dull, driven Mankind. And let us take to
heart the _reductio ad absurdum_ of all such schemes in the latest and
hugest joke of our one great laughing philosopher, when he shows us
the world governed by bald, toothless and passionless sages, who, even
without having reached the years of Methuselah, have long survived the
age when every decent person should retire to his or her coffin.
And before leaving the subject of the services (sometimes scarcely
desired) which Genius may need at the humble hands of Intelligence,
let me point out how our men of genius or thereabouts (“Creative
Intellects” is the official expression) have latterly taken over
one of the most remunerative and mischievous employments of all
obsolete priesthoods, to wit: of frightening believers with bogies
of their manufacture. For, just as the Torments of Hell and the
Pitfalls of Sin formerly supplied matter for all the learning and
eloquence of centuries of Divines, so nowadays encyclopædic science
and journalistic emphasis are being applied to making our flesh creep
with prophecies of Perils. There is Peril from black, brown, yellow
races; from Semites, Mongols, Latins (in “Nordic” countries), Teutons
(in Latin countries), Celts all over Anglo-Saxondom, Jews throughout
the globe; Bolsheviks, Fascists and Junkers, International Communism
and International Finance, Militarism which was put an end to by the
War, besides our old friends Jesuits and Freemasons. There is Peril
from the multiplication of Idiots and the multiplication of Supermen;
Peril from depopulation and Peril from overpopulation, from unsexed
women and over-sexed women; Peril from over-much altruism, and Peril
from insufficient altruism. Perils which I cannot even remember, but
by whose side those of War, Pestilence and Famine are, of course, too
familiar to be noticed. Indeed, it is characteristic of this latter-day
apocalypse that none of the prophets of disaster prophesied the War
and the Fruits of Victory, except, if I remember correctly, Mr. H. G.
Wells, who, however, once the War had been declared, enlisted at once
for the Fleet Street Front and bid us unsheath the Sword of Peace for
the final extermination of Militarism....
Therefore, it strikes me that in view of this multifold reincarnation
of the spirit of prophecy in our Men of Science and of Letters, some
increase of Intelligence may well be needed to steady our nerves and
allow us to recognize the real dangers of which, heaven knows, there
are plenty requiring to be faced with ... well, the far-too-little
Intelligence already at our disposal. For, possibly because it is not
“creative” (and _creation_ usually implies chaos and refuse-heaps),
Intelligence is especially preservative and sheltering. It is the
natural purifier and tidier-up where Genius and Stupidity, disrupting
and corrupting by turns, have between them played the deuce with our
poor mortal heritage. And in the face of the millionfold sacrifices of
self and others which Ideals and Heroisms have once again presented to
our foolish admiration, I would go so far as to add that Intelligence
is often more humane than Sentiment, and, oftener still, more
beneficent than what we call Virtue.
From the misapplications of our Science, the exaggerations and lunacies
of our Genius, and the havoc wrought by our higher instincts, we
therefore need to be saved, not by Reason, which is always too long
in getting under weigh, but by Intelligence, active, alacritous and
ubiquitous, afraid neither of being laughed at nor of laughing at
others.... But even as I stammer out this old-fashioned demand for
_Salvation_, the name of Proteus sounds suddenly in the ear of my
spirit. How can I tell what Proteus may next be――perhaps already
is――changing into? And after prating about Intelligence being one-half
light-hearted scepticism and one-half steady confidence, am I going to
join the mixed choir, ecstatic or growling, of prophesying optimists
and pessimists?
But, though restrained by that thought of Proteus and his frequently
inconsiderate metamorphoses, I should like to add a word on one
question regarding the near future of Intelligence, but with the
understanding that I do so not as a prophet of what may happen, so
much as a witness of half a century’s already accomplished changes.
The question, or rather query, has doubtless occurred to some of
my readers, and is as follows: Granted that Intelligence rids us
of dangerous superstitions, and rids us, moreover, of the habit of
superstition, which is a matter less of _what_ than of _how_ one
believes; granted that along with lucidity Intelligence brings also
intellectual equity, cleanness and dignity; granted all this, may
not such gains be paid for in disproportionate loss? And may not
Intelligence itself constitute a danger? Has it not already begun
despoiling life of many of the shelters built by the Ages with
unknowing or inspired hands? Worse still: will it not replace with its
narrow and wavering lucidity those dark unquestioning instincts and
aspirations, lurking ever ready in the obscure organization and the
mysterious formulæ inherited from our remotest ancestors?
To this I would answer that, so far as my observation tells me, the
soul will always find some shape and some material wherein to build, or
to restore, the shelters needed in its moments of weariness and sorrow,
there to await the consolation which no creed seems to bring without
the supreme aid of time. On the other hand, that the instinctive part
of our nature, when it is truly instinctive, can surely be trusted
to keep itself alive in the face of the (alas!) inevitably feeble
imperatives of such new-comers as Reason and Intelligence. Moreover,
that all the sciences dealing with man point to the fact that
traditional commandments and, even more, physiologically transmitted
tendencies, have constituted themselves as responses to changing
environments and needs, so that their transformation may be expected as
a result of the very movement of things which has produced them.
And, finally, I would add that, even if all this were doubtful, we
must accept the risks which the coming of Intelligence may entail upon
us, because (so at least appears evident to me) whatever sets-back and
temporary overwhelmings it may suffer in the future, Intelligence is of
such nature that, once come, it must develop, or at least bide its time
and revive in as yet unforeseeable manner. And Intelligence itself must
prepare us to expect that every change may mean a loss, but likewise
mean an opportunity. Perhaps it may even sometimes show us how the
one can turn into the other; for does not Intelligence keep an eye on
Proteus?
FINIS.
Transcriber’s Notes:
――A Table of Contents has been provided for the convenience of the
reader, and is granted to the public domain.
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
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