A Little Knowledge

THE materialism and cynicism of our age increase with the apparent shrinkage of the Unknown. Were we more ignorant of physical facts, we should be men of faith; if we knew more, we should be enlightened; but we have grown puffed up with half-knowledge. We are like a party of tourists walking unconcernedly through a vast cave — unconcernedly because the cave has been strung with electric lights, and although we may observe hastily we may explore no longer. We note the formations which the guide points out to us, smiling indulgently at a stalagmite resembling a buffalo’s head or a crucifix, but the awful thrill of the first pioneer who with smoky and uncertain torch penetrated these chambers is not vouchsafed to us. We are merely interested in our cave — in our world.

Interest has no emotional and very little intellectual value. We are interested in many things which in no wise touch our lives or move us to action, in a dog that talks, the League of Nations, or a bicycle race. We are interested in politics, but we do not vote; we are interested in keeping the peace, yet the world will be in flames again for no sufficient cause. Either positively or negatively this prevailing mood means very little, and, meaning little, becomes a stagnancy of mind wherein cynicism may breed most abundantly.

We receive too much information and suffer too many disillusionments. Sometimes it seems that the Egyptian priests were right in limiting their knowledge of facts to the small class able to appreciate their insignificance. To reach the mass of people knowledge must be imparted superficially to those unready for its complete exposition. And, treated so, it becomes false, and dangerously false. For example, there can be no doubt that popular articles on the new psychology have marred more normal minds than the abnormal minds cured by the specialists.

When travelers in a new country behold the sunset over western hills, they are rapt away by the beauty of the lights and shadows. Exploring the hills on the morrow, they find them cluttered with mean houses and factories, and never again can they view them, even from a distance, without feeling that the squalor is there, though they do not see it. Henceforth when they approach hills they pay no heed to the distant beauty. They gaze at the sunset with candid eyes, murmuring to themselves, ‘Very interesting effect of light, but to-morrow we’ll see things as they are.’ The tragedy is that somewhere in the world these travelers will come to hills planted with cool groves and watered by clear streams, but they will not go up into them, too wise, as they think, to be deceived a second time. They have eaten too much, and yet too little, of the tree of knowledge.

So many of us are victims to this false wisdom. I remember the flamboyant complaisance of a mechanistic philosopher when he was demolishing a supernatural First Cause. ‘First Cause! Why, gentlemen!’ His tone was reproachful. Turning to the board, he swiftly drew a tadpole-like creature endowed with two eyes. ‘When a ray of light strikes it from the left, it must turn, willy-nilly, to the left; when from the right, it turns to the right. If the light comes with equal intensity from both sides, it will remain perfectly still. If from in front, it will be drawn directly forward. There is no volition in all that, gentlemen! Nothing but automatic nervous reaction! And by multiplying the complexities of the nervous systems and stimuli applied to them we can trace the cause and effect in any form of life — granted, of course, that we have complete information.’ Complete information! Oh, granted — of course! Is the amœba, then, less the residence of the Unknown than the divided leaf, the rock, the earth itself? For this philosopher it must be said, however, that he was far more than interested in his theory, and that he evoked from one indignant undergraduate a marginal response: ‘He has merely reduced in size the dwelling place of the Mystery.’ Others considered he had proved his case. They were equipped with one more fact to face a materialistic universe — the only sad part being that the fact happened not to be true.

Without ‘complete knowledge’ any fact is apt to be false. A trained scientist may be able to reconstruct a dinosaur from its third vertebra; an archæologist may plot out Zenobia’s palace from a single tile; but the average man daily builds horrific monsters from the smallest splinter of evidence, or from one brick of information constructs pinnacles of misinformation compared to which the Leaning Tower is a model of verticality. Nothing is unknown to him. He has the facts!

Even the artists, who, except for the priests, are supposed to be the chief instigators of spiritual exploit, are victims of ‘facts.’ They have become, as a young musician proudly told me, wholly cerebral. The occasion of this remark was the performance of a very advanced piece of work, scored for heaven knows what ungodly instruments, which purported to express in music the rhythms, sounds, and moods of modern city life. It did! And I shut my ears, having heard that sort of thing just outside the concert hall. ‘But don’t you see how clever it is! He’s a perfect technician — even his enemies admit that.’ A perfect technician, this composer had indeed the facts of the matter, lacking only the fundamental truth that music must in some way please the human car. And so, too, with the modernist poets and painters. They are clever, they know what they are doing, but they have left out of account such unavoidable elements as the human ear, eye,and heart.

Under this deluge of facts and halffacts, we are interested in everything and understand nothing. Priests of a mystical religion deny the sacraments and turn to sociology; men crammed with a knowledge of obscure dialects, but unable to speak their own language with elegance, teach literature at universities; and everywhere who is most efficient is adjudged most valuable.

Those who continue to believe what they are told become materialists. They are in the large majority. Life being, as is reported, hardly more than a chemical reaction, they might as well devote themselves to physical indulgence. Those who cease to believe become the cynics. Having accepted facts and found them wanting, they find nothing left for them but an airy indifference. They are the disillusioned.

I wish that westward of us there were still an undiscovered or conjectural continent, a blue dream in the mist where anything might happen. An occasional traveler might return thence to fire our imagination with his tales. It would do us no harm to fall again under the spell of Wonder. Indeed, even the old superstitions, the gnomes, ogres, hobgoblins, were mild and truthful as compared with the daily threats we receive from advertisements of disease, social gaucherie, uninsured death.

Let some man with a loud voice proclaim to all the peoples one piece of information without which all the rest is pestilential rubbish: that although we have mapped all the continents, sung ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ by radio from New York to London, invented the Œdipus complex and the submarine, we still know practically nothing; that the vision of the mystic is quite probably as true as the figures in the scientist’s laboratory; that for one America exploited and destroyed there are incalculable Americas of the spirit, where no factory can be built and no information gleaned!