Ultimate Convictions

MOST of us if questioned as to our ultimate convictions would unhesitatingly give such answers as — the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the unvaryingness of natural law, the relativity of knowledge, the inaccessibility of the supernatural, democracy. A few cautious or frivolous folk would want to sleep on it. The small number of really serious people who answered quite honestly would avow such ultimate convictions as that sausage and Germans are nasty, that red-headed women are bad-tempered, that well-dressed people are mostly fools, that servants are dishonest, that whoever wears a ready-made tie is not a gentleman, that doctors are ignoramuses, that eating smoked herring is vulgar. But these are prejudices. Not at all; by any fair test they better deserve the name of ultimate convictions than the ambitious articles of faith with which we began. And the test is simply this: on which set of convictions do men act? Plainly on the second. Your believer in immortality will cheerfully imperil his soul through a long lifetime, your fanatic of the relativity of knowledge will be completely irate in discussion with a dogmatist, your advocate of the unknowable, if entrusted with power, would conscientiously proclaim, ‘The Unknowable or the sword.'

In short, these ambitious categories are not, properly speaking, convictions at all, but mere simulacra thereof. They are emblems, not principles. We would willingly die for them, just as the predatory politician will honestly yearn to die for his country’s flag; but Heaven keep us from the folly of living by our ultimate convictions! Such is the unspoken prayer of most sensible people who reserve their creeds for Sunday or election-day use. A rather plain-spoken person, Geoffrey Chaucer, once wrote,

We should then be following two eminent truth-tellers should we degrade most metaphysical, theological, and political formulas from their false estate of convictions to that of intermittently recurrent prejudices. To complete the demonstration, we need only show that the real ultimate convictions are invariably acted on. You may make a Christian Scientist out of a Jesuit, but hardly a sausage-eater out of a sausage-hater. Nor shall you win to friendly association with Germans one whose axiom it is that they are nasty. Many persons call in a physician as an expected social form, and habitually disregard his advice. In fact, a true medicophobe will gladly pay a fee for the pleasure of flouting his doctor. At every point we shall find that the test of action will prove what we commonly call prejudices to be our genuine and most intimate convictions.

In great as in small affairs this truth holds. We know a business man who after careful scrutiny of an enterprise was on the point of a large investment. Hearing casually that the promoter’s cheeks were adorned with side-whiskers, the capitalist brushed the project aside. He knew that no luck could come of association with a man who wore ‘weepers.’ Indeed, experience had taught him that such persons were not merely inauspicious, but positively untrustworthy. At the risk of anticlimax the present writer must avow that, saving the case of very ancient clergymen, he has absolutely no confidence in the taste or morals of any person wearing congress gaiters. Of course such a conviction, being based on a sound analogy between elasticity in principles and in footgear, is not to be confused with the more irrational sort of ultimate convictions. But at bottom the reason hardly comes in. We simply feel and act in a certain way, and that is all there is of it. We dig our last ditches where we please, and not where any moral Vauban dictates. The chaste Lucretia, it will be recalled, because of the outrage of Tarquin, killed herself. This certainly looks like the working of a transcendental ultimate conviction. Yet we should not forget that it is quite possible that the chaste Lucretia would equally have killed herself if her husband had persistently required her to eat mutton, if indeed, in proper resentment of such persecution, she had not killed him.

Shortsighted people will feel that this reversal, by which, according word with deed, our prejudices become our convictions, somehow degrades human nature. To which the answer is, first, that the truth is no respecter of persons; and next, the counter-query, Does it degrade? On the contrary it exalts. By an instinctive altruism we dig our last ditches where they will endanger few but ourselves. If the theological and political creeds which we profess really guided our conduct, New York soon would be a new Constantinople, with massacre hanging on the presence or absence of a grammatical prefix. To build your ultimate convictions too high is socially dangerous. The man who stands on his notion of the substance or essence of divinity will appeal to the fagots if he may; the man who would perish before eating snails or frogs’ legs is content with a subjective superiority. In fact, while dissent is only an offense to our philosophical and churchly prejudices, it is actually a salve to our ultimate convictions. We pride ourselves in those who vulgarly breakfast on smoked herring; they are our background, the conspicuous evidence of our own gentle tastes. It might seem that some Providence had deliberately set our more rigid principles in the field of the wholly inconsequential, in order that men might differ without hating. Lest, influenced by reason, we should act too unreasonably, a great gulf has wisely been established between the proud heights of reason and the pleasant table-land of our ultimate convictions.