The House of the Mind

IT was John Bunyan who long ago wrote an allegory on the Castle of Mansoul. Houses are more fashionable than castles nowadays, and minds, I fear, than souls, and it is time that someone produced a treatment of the House of Man’s Mind.

It must perhaps be reluctantly admitted that not every mind merits description under the figure of a house. For some conventional intelligences the Flat of the Mind would be an adequate symbol. Yet at its best estate the mind is like some spacious mansion with varied chambers, Victorian or Colonial, butnot without a very comfortable modern wing for practical convenience. For the mind is no unalterable house, but a developing structure in which successive historical periods are reflected, just as they are in the material fabrics of old seats of learning, in the remodeling of whose very buildings one can read the history of their times.

Only yesterday, the great collegiate houses of the mind were putting on new fronts and adding new wings, to meet the needs of war. Perhaps a tent would be a fitter symbol of these martial additions, for in the autumn of 1918 the universities were military camps. In hundreds of colleges the first academic assembly this year was At the Flag Pole, at 11 A.M. October first. At that hour, in all these little sisters to West Point, the members of the Student Army Training Corps, one hundred and fifty thousand strong, ‘ pledged their lives to the honor and defense of their country.’ We felt ourselves in a different world, even from that of last spring. We had given up our favorite courses, our seminars and select groups of graduate students. We were ransacking our past and digging up some less rarefied studies in which we were once, we dimly remembered, counted proficient. The happiest man in this new order was the one who could turn his back upon the specialty of his mature years and teach the military freshman what the army told us he needed most to learn.

Our colleagues in law and divinity went about disguised as professors of trigonometry and surveying, to which matters, it now appeared, they had devoted their studious youth. Others of us, fearful that such mathematical instruction as we could give might pave the way for military disaster, volunteered for less devious subjects — American history, French, and English composition.

One learned doctor of divinity, on undertaking to renew his youth by impart - ing trigonometry to the troops, ventured timidly to inquire about the textbook. His mathematical Mentor launched into a glowing account of the work (which it turned out he had written), declaring that it read like a novel and was as simple as a child. My friend hastened to provide himself with this paragon of textbooks. Thefirstsentencethatcaught his eye was this: ‘The method pursued in this book is purely heuristic.’ This had a reassuring sound, but disclosed nothing definite about the method save that it was clearly no ordinary one. As the paragon contained no glossary, and the large dictionary was not at hand, he took counsel with his erudite neighbors. Some weakly suggested that it must be a misprint. Others, under Gallic influence, hazarded that the method was to study the book only so long as the student found pleasure in so doing. This interpretation tallied with the conviction general among instructors that study is now a much more pleasurable process than it was when they were students.

The great reading-rooms of the library were halls for supervised study for the corps, each presided over by an officer. For this and other duties, an initiated friend informed me, we were to be reinforced with thirty-seven officers. ‘ Real officers?’ I queried doubtfully. ’Real officers,’ he replied a shade sternly. But he was related to Stonewall Jackson and is not appalled by the atmosphere of war. It was a stirring sight of an evening to see the companies marching from their several barracks across the moonlit quadrangles to study-hour in those big reading-rooms, with no sound but the regular beat of marching feet and an occasional sharp word of command.

The flag-raising was, indeed, an impressive occasion. Together our academic and military chieftains, across a hollow square flanked by serried masses of civilians, confronted fifteen of the real officers, backed by the Technical Corps in uniform, while a mixed multitude of prospective S.A.T.C. men brought up the rear. ‘Technical Corps forward—How!’ shouted the commanding officer. But the Technical Corps for some reason, perhaps for fear of treading on the fifteen real officers, did not advance. ‘Come right forward, Technical Corps,’ cont inued the major soothingly; and the Technical Corps, thus encouraged, advanced with all soldierly propriety a few steps nearer the seat of authority. The bugler blew ‘To the Colors,’the flag slowly rose; the officers saluted, the soldiers stood at attention, the civilians took off their hats. Militarization had set in.

The divinity halls were barracks, and so was the football stand. For a time the football team was without a habitation, and the Old Man was desolate. The men’s clubhouse was turned over to the Y.M.C.A. The women’s clubhouse was a hostess house, and the deans of women, martially dispossessed of their office rooms, sought temporary shelter in Classics. In a corner of one of the quadrangles is a building modeled on St. John’s garden front at Oxford — a gray stone thing of mullioned oriel windows, half hid in clambering ivies. In our upheaval, this mellow and solid fabric became a hut, thus reversing the process applied to ancient Rome by a certain gentleman who found it brick and left it marble.

So was our sanctuary violated, so our fair college turned, not to a hospital, perhaps, but to a military school. It was all reflected in our new vocabulary. The clubhouse had become a hut. The men’s halls were barracks. The dininghall was ‘ mess, ’ not to say ‘ chow.’ We marched to class (now known, alas, as ‘school’) and recited standing at attention. Mess, drill, school, quarters — in these four life was comprised. The freedom, leisure, idleness of academic days gave place to the fully prescribed routine of military training. Our sole period of repose was night, which began with taps and ended with what a freshman described to me as ‘revelry,’ thus casting new light upon Byron’s famous line, —

Truly we were upheaved. You rose up blithely in the morning, a mere professor of patristics, with not a care in the world and with very few students. You lay down wearily at night, a Y.M.C.A. secretary burdened with the responsibility of a large and crowded hut, with a flourishing canteen, and a staff of three secretaries each more efficient than yourself. And all through no fault of yours; but solely because the real secretary’s passports were unexpectedly ready and he had left for France.

The military transformation was not indeed wholly free from minor inconveniences. The first night that guards were set about our Campus Martius a surprising number of suspicious strangers fell into the military net. Library attendants, setting out for home as usual after taps, found their ordinary egress barred by zealous sentries, and were ordered to the other end of the quadrangles. There they encountered an even more resolute sentinel, who improved the opportunity to administer to them an extended reprimand. A zoologist who had worked late over his experiments was not a little astonished to be halted on the confines of the campus, and narrowly missed exchanging the security of his laboratory for that of the guardhouse. To enter the academic precincts was even more difficult. The janitorial night-shift, coming on for its priestlike task of pure ablution, found the quadrangles like the beleaguered city of scripture, straitly shut up; none went out and none came in. With such custodians we were surely in no danger of surprise. But it is not a little disconcerting toward the close of a recitation, when the notes of a bugle float in at the open windows, to see your whole class rise as one man and rush from the room, the hindmost, as he disappears, cryingover his shoulder, ‘ He’s blowing “Retreat”!’

Not the least benefit of all this upheaval is that it in a measure relieves us from the bondage of books. So short a time ago we cared for nothing but the reading and the writing of books. In this time of war-making the vanity of such pursuits has become clear. A statistical friend informs me that modern publishers turn out almost a hundred thousand different books a year. One shudders to think how many they refuse. The most extraordinary thing about this excessive book-production is that we get on with reading so few of them. The fact is, reading books is not the wholly beneficent exercise it was formerly considered. For one thing, it begets in one a negative and commonplace attitude of mind, and unfits one for free self-expression. I once knew a man who had read so many books that he was quite incapable of independent thought. It is like being led about by the hand until one cannot get around in any other way.

But in the presence of war, actions speak louder than words, and practical studies are to the fore. There was little of the familiar casual attitude till lately fashionable with the modern undergraduate. For all t he distractions of orderly duty and supervised study, the freshman of October, 1918, made a serious business of trying to be both student and soldier. There was a spirit abroad among them which, as one freshman wrote‘put a new face on the old saying, ”Gott mit Huns.”’ Nothing better illustrates this new spirit than the behavior of the women students. They militarized themselves, and in their Woman Student Training Corps formed an organization with drills, officers, uniforms, a war-service pledge, and a muster-roll almost equal to that of the local S.A.T.C. itself.

Never was academic transformation swifter or more complete, and never did one hold shorter sway. For six weeks to a day this extraordinary experiment linked us to history. It was no small satisfaction to be teaching men, some of whom, as we all believed in October, would soon be officers in the new army. Then came the armistice. But those morning and evening bugles, and those columns in khaki which made the college a castle, will not soon be forgotten even in the haunts of ancient peace.

If these academic houses have been camps, the individual house of Man’s Mind has been in the way of towering again into its old lofty proportions of the Castle of Mansoul, and marks of this period will long be with us in stouter walls and higher turrets. Others not quite so near the scene of conflict have at least forsaken the rich and quiet chambers of the mind, to build and occupy new quarters suited to the hour.

He can have given little thought to his own mind who does not see in it a complex structure, with many rooms that are far from modern. Everybody, one observes, is orthodox in some phase of his thinking; that is, there are some old rooms in his mind which he has not yet remodeled. Nor are these older chambers of the mind tenantless. In many a one of them dwells the spirit of some ancestor who added it to our mental establishment. For the mind is in a measure an inheritance, however much we may be responsible for the furniture we put into it. It is partly the society of these old fellows that makes these chambers of the mind attractive or otherwise. Who has not felt, in moments of sheer enjoyment, the disapproving presence of some stiff old Puritan forefather to whom all pleasure was anathema, and has not forthwith fled to some sunnier mental spaces where he could not follow? For these subtenants of ours, as if bedridden, cannot leave the quarters they have bequeathed to us. It would not be possible to get them all down to the dining-room together, to devour, say, a good book with you. And if it could be done, probably no single book would hold the interest of all these diversities.

What with construction and addition, some minds come to be of palatial proportions, richly furnished by reading, travel, and observation, looking out through many windows upon fair prospects and far horizons. They are affluent, tranquil, settled abodes, in which the occupant lives busily, yet at ease. Their cupboards and store-rooms quickly yield what you are in search of, in the way of fact, opinion, or reaction. It is not alone that they contain much, but their contents seem to be so conveniently and accessibly disposed. These are the palatial minds, the houses of the mental aristocracy. They have many chambers, some looking westward over the fruitful past, but others to the east and the expectant future. For these houses are not mere treasuries of old values. Their occupants will show you many a new acquisition, with all the zest of the discoverer. Only these have not destroyed the proportion and perspective of the possessor, or made him forgetful of his other goods of longer standing. In minds like these you can wander for hours, finding new treasures, interests, and outlooks. We stay in them with a sense of luxury, and we leave them with a feeling of deprivation.

One sometimes finds his way into minds less spacious and well-ordered. Some are small but exquisitely furnished, and with their one or two rooms make delightful visiting. They have a genial atmosphere that is lacking in many a grander house.

Whatever be the origin or extent of the mental habitations that we occupy, for their furniture we are responsible. A common scheme of mental furnishing consists of a few prejudices inconspicuously placed where the chance visitor will stumble over them. Once, as I was playing the fourth hole of a Western golf course, a man driving by in a wagon stopped to offer me a golfball that he had found, and pressed it upon me as a free gift until I could not very well refuse. He then invited me to enter his mind, which I did. It was not large, but it was a busy place, elaborately furnished with prejudices of the most substantial sort. He expounded to me the war, which, it developed, was nothing less than the irrepressible conflict between Romanism and Free-Masonry. The war has led to a remarkable airing out of the cupboards of the mind, and some very quaint furniture has incidentally been exposed to neighborly observation.

Not only in the amount and arrangement of their furniture, but in its character, minds differ very much. Some admit nothing but the latest thing, and think shame to show anything as old as last season. Others exhibit only secondhand articles. In the bric-à-brac of such a mind you encounter a host of jokes and anecdotes which bring back your lost youth. One sometimes meets men whose minds are furnished exclusively in the style of the eighteenth century — and unfortunately not always with the genuine antiques. And what a treatise might be written upon mental housekeeping: how windows should be kept clean, the furniture frequently shifted and overhauled, and grievances aired as little as possible, and only when nobody is about.

The most gracious aspect of a house is its hospitality. Some guests we admit to certain chambers but never think of entertaining in others. They would not understand or enjoy them. So it comes about that the same mind shows very different sides to different visitors. One you admit at once to the living-room; another never gets farther than the reception-room. A third has but to show himself, to be ushered into the intimacy of the garden or the study; and a fourth may come in without ringing, and you will cheerfully take him with you over the whole house from attic to cellar. For friendship is to have the latchkey of another’s mind.

It is clearly the business of the mind to build it more stately mansions as the swift seasons roll. For the mind cannot remain fixed, no matter what the psalmist thought about the heart. Ourselves, like everything and everybody else, must change. Here we have been misled by what we may call the delusive fixity of art. Art has beguiled us and we have been beguiled. In all its forms it has conspired to create in us the conviction that life, when it has attained a certain estate, becomes stationary. Everything about art is calculated to give one that settled impression. It has taught us to expect fixity, whereas life shows us only endless process and function, to which in mind and body we must conform.

Our minds are filled with these images of art, and upon them we unconsciously frame our thinking. But they are not real. Even the realities for which they stand are constantly changing. Your friends and associates of last year are now lieutenants, captains, majors, colonels. They are not the same. The very nations are not the same. What were Ukrainia and CzechoSlovakia when you last went abroad? Can the mind then remain the same? It is a painful business living in a house that is being remodeled, and doubly so when it is the house of the mind. But in a world of new forces and changed faces, when a new thoroughfare is being opened through the mental property of each of us, it is not enough to withdraw into our mental habitations and shut the door. We must change our minds.