第23章 CHAPTER VIII(1)

AN enumeration of the useless would almost be an enumeration of everything hitherto pursued. For instance, to go back as far as possible, the study and labour expended on Egyptian inscriptions and papyri, which contain nothing but doubtful, because laudatory history, invocations to idols, and similar matters: all these labours are in vain.

Take a broom and sweep the papyri away into the dust. The Assyrian terra-cotta tablets, some recording fables, and some even sadder--contracts between men whose bodies were dust twenty centuries since--take a hammer and demolish them. Set a battery to beat down the pyramids, and a mind-battery to destroy the deadening influence of tradition.

The Greek statue lives to this day, and has the highest use of all, the use of true beauty. The Greek and Roman philosophers have the value of furnishing the mind with material to think from. Egyptian and Assyrian, mediaeval and eighteenth-century culture, miscalled, are all alike mere dust, and absolutely useless.

There is a mass of knowledge so called at the present day equally useless, and nothing but an encumbrance. We are forced by circumstances to become familiar with it, but the time expended on it is lost. No physical ideal--far less any soul- ideal--will ever be reached by it. In a recent generation erudition in the text of the classics was considered the most honourable of pursuits; certainly nothing could be less valuable. In our own generation, another species of erudition is lauded--erudition in the laws of matter--which, in itself, is but one degree better. The study of matter for matter's sake is despicable; if any can turn that study to advance the ideal of life, it immediately becomes most valuable. But not without the human ideal. It is nothing to me if the planets revolve around the sun, or the sun around the earth, unless I can thereby gather an increase of body or mind. As the conception of the planets revolving around the sun, the present astronomical conception of the heavens, is distinctly grander than that of Ptolemy, it is therefore superior, and a gain to the human mind. So with other sciences, not immediately useful, yet if they furnish the mind with material of thought, they are an advance.

But not in themselves--only in conjunction with the human ideal.

Once let that slip out of the thought, and science is of no more use than the invocations in the Egyptian papyri. The world would be the gainer if the Nile rose and swept away pyramid and tomb, sarcophagus, papyri, and inscription; for it seems as if most of the superstitions which still to this hour, in our own country, hold minds in their sway, originated in Egypt. The world would be the gainer if a Nile flood of new thought arose and swept away the past, concentrating the effort of all the races of the earth upon man's body, that it might reach an ideal of shape, and health, and happiness.

Nothing is of any use unless it gives me a stronger body and mind, a more beautiful body, a happy existence, and a soul-life now. The last phase of philosophy is equally useless with the rest. The belief that the human mind was evolved, in the process of unnumbered years, from a fragment of palpitating slime through a thousand gradations, is a modern superstition, and proceeds upon assumption alone.

Nothing is evolved, no evolution takes place, there is no record of such an event; it is pure assertion. The theory fascinates many, because they find, upon study of physiology, that the gradations between animal and vegetable are so fine and so close together, as if a common web bound them together. But although they stand so near they never change places. They are like the figures on the face of a clock; there are minute dots between, apparently connecting each with the other, and the hands move round over all. Yet ten never becomes twelve, and each second even is parted from the next, as you may hear by listening to the beat. So the gradations of life, past and present, though standing close together never change places. Nothing is evolved.

There is no evolution any more than there is any design in nature. By standing face to face with nature, and not from books, I have convinced myself that there is no design and no evolution. What there is, what was the cause, how and why, is not yet known; certainly it was neither of these.

But it may be argued the world must have been created, or it must have been made of existing things, or it must have been evolved, or it must have existed for ever, through all eternity.

I think not. I do not think that either of these are "musts," nor that any "must" has yet been discovered; not even that there "must" be a first cause.