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Томас де Квинси
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1

XXIII. IS THE HUMAN RACE ON THE DOWN GRADE?

As to individual nations, it is matter of notoriety that they are often improgressive. As a whole, it may be true that the human race is under a necessity of slowly advancing; and it may be a necessity, also, that the current of the moving waters should finally absorb into its motion that part of the waters which, left to itself, would stagnate. All this may be true—and yet it will not follow that the human race must be moving constantly upon an ascending line, as thus:

nor even upon such a line, with continual pauses or rests interposed, as thus:

where there is no going back, though a constant interruption to the going forward; but a third hypothesis is possible: there may be continual loss of ground, yet so that continually the loss is more than compensated, and the total result, for any considerable period of observation, may be that progress is maintained:

At O, by comparison with the previous elevation at A, there is a repeated falling back; but still upon the whole, and pursuing the inquiry through a sufficiently large segment of time, the constant report is—ascent.

Upon this explanation it is perfectly consistent with a general belief in the going forward of man—that this particular age in which we live might be stationary, or might even have gone back. It cannot, therefore, be upon any à priori principle that I maintain the superiority of this age. It is, and must be upon special examination, applied to the phenomena of this special age. The last century, in its first thirty years, offered the spectacle of a death-like collapse in the national energies. All great interests suffered together. The intellectual power of the country, spite of the brilliant display in a lower element, made by one or two men of genius, languished as a whole. The religious feeling was torpid, and in a degree which insured the strong reaction of some irritating galvanism, or quickening impulse such as that which was in fact supplied by Methodism. It is not with that age that I wish to compare the present. I compare it with the age which terminated thirty years ago—roused, invigorated, searched as that age was through all its sensibilities by the electric shock of the French Revolution. It is by comparison with an age so keenly alive, penetrated by ideas stirring and uprooting, that I would compare it; and even then the balance of gain in well-calculated resource, fixed yet stimulating ideals, I hold to be in our favour—and this in opposition to much argument in an adverse spirit from many and influential quarters. Indeed, it is a remark which more than once I have been led to make in print: that if a foreigner were to inquire for the moral philosophy, the ethics, and even for the metaphysics, of our English literature, the answer would be, 'Look for them in the great body of our Divinity.' Not merely the more scholastic works on theology, but the occasional sermons of our English divines contain a body of richer philosophical speculation than is elsewhere to be found; and, to say the truth, far more instructive than anything in our Lockes, Berkeleys, or other express and professional philosophers. Having said this by way of showing that I do not overlook their just pretensions, let me have leave to notice a foible in these writers which is not merely somewhat ludicrous, but even seriously injurious to truth. One and all, through a long series of two hundred and fifty years, think themselves called upon to tax their countrymen—each severally in his own age—with a separate, peculiar, and unexampled guilt of infidelity and irreligion. Each worthy man, in his turn, sees in his own age overt signs of these offences not to be matched in any other. Five-and-twenty periods of ten years each may be taken, concerning each of which some excellent writer may be cited to prove that it had reached a maximum of atrocity, such as should not easily have been susceptible of aggravation, but which invariably the relays through all the subsequent periods affirm their own contemporaries to have attained. Every decennium is regularly worse than that which precedes it, until the mind is perfectly confounded by the Pelion upon Ossa which must overwhelm the last term of the twenty-five. It is the mere necessity of a logical sorites, that such a horrible race of villains as the men of the twenty-fifth decennium ought not to be suffered to breathe. Now, the whole error arises out of an imbecile self-surrender to the first impressions from the process of abstraction as applied to remote objects. Survey a town under the benefit of a ten miles' distance, combined with a dreamy sunshine, and it will appear a city of celestial palaces. Enter it, and you will find the same filth, the same ruins, the same disproportions as anywhere else. So of past ages, seen through the haze of an abstraction which removes all circumstantial features of deformity. Call up any one of those ages, if it were possible, into the realities of life, and these worthy praisers of the past would be surprised to find every feature repeated which they had fancied peculiar to their own times. Meanwhile this erroneous doctrine of sermons has a double ill consequence: first, the whole chain of twenty-five writers, when brought together, consecutively reflect a colouring of absurdity upon each other; separately they might be endurable, but all at once, predicating (each of his own period exclusively) what runs with a rolling fire through twenty-five such periods in succession, cannot but recall to the reader that senseless doctrine of a physical decay in man, as if man were once stronger, broader, taller, etc.—upon which hypothesis of a gradual descent why should it have stopped at any special point? How could the human race have failed long ago to reach the point of zero? But, secondly, such a doctrine is most injurious and insulting to Christianity. If, after eighteen hundred years of development, it could be seriously true of Christianity that it had left any age or generation of men worse in conduct, or in feeling, or in belief, than all their predecessors, what reasonable expectation could we have that in eighteen hundred years more the case would be better? Such thoughtless opinions make Christianity to be a failure.

XXIV. BREVIA: SHORT ESSAYS (IN CONNECTION
WITH EACH OTHER.)

1.—Paganism and Christianity—the Ideas of Duty and Holiness

The Pagan God could have perfect peace with his votary, and yet could have no tendency to draw that votary to himself. Not so with the God of Christianity, who cannot give His peace without drawing like a vortex to Himself, who cannot draw into His own vortex without finding His peace fulfilled.

'An age when lustre too intense.'—I am much mistaken if Mr. Wordsworth is not deeply wrong here. Wrong he is beyond a doubt as to the fact; for there could have been no virtual intensity of lustre (unless merely as a tinsel toy) when it was contradicted by everything in the manners, habits, and situations of the Pagan Gods—they who were content to play in the coarsest manner the part of gay young bloods, sowing their wild oats, and with a recklessness of consequences to their female partners never by possibility rivalled by men. I believe and affirm that lustre the most dazzling and blinding would not have any ennobling effect except as received into a matrix of previous unearthly and holy type.

As to Bacchus being eternally young, the ancients had no idea or power to frame the idea of eternity. Their eternity was a limitary thing. And this I say not empirically, but à priori, on the ground that without the idea of holiness and unfleshliness, eternity cannot rise buoyant from the ground, cannot sustain itself. But waive this, and what becomes of the other things? If he were characteristically distinguished as young, then, by a mere rebound of the logic, the others were not so honoured, else where is the special privilege of Bacchus?

'And she shall sing there as in the days of her youth' (Hosea ii. 15).—The case of pathos, a person coming back to places, recalling the days of youth after a long woe, is quite unknown to the ancients—nay, the maternal affection itself, though used inevitably, is never consciously reviewed as an object of beauty.

Duties arise everywhere, but—do not mistake—not under their sublime form as duties. I claim the honour to have first exposed a fallacy too common: duties never did, never will, arise save under Christianity, since without it the sense of a morality lightened by religious motive, aspiring to holiness, not only of act, but of motive, had not before it even arisen. It is the pressure of society, its mere needs and palpable claims, which first calls forth duties, but not as duties; rather as the casting of parts in a scenical arrangement. A duty, under the low conception to which at first it conforms, is a rôle, no more; it is strictly what we mean when we talk of a part. The sense of conscience strictly is not touched under any preceding system of religion. It is the daughter of Christianity. How little did Wordsworth seize the fact in his Ode: 'Stern Daughter of the Voice of God' is not enough; the voice of God is the conscience; and neither has been developed except by Christianity.

The conscience of a pagan was a conscience pointing to detection: it pointed only to the needs of society, and caused fear, shame, anxiety, only on the principles of sympathy; that is, from the impossibility of releasing himself from a dependence on the reciprocal feelings—the rebound, the dependence on the resentments of others.

Morals.—Even ordinary morals could have little practical weight with the ancients: witness the Roman juries and Roman trials. Had there been any sense of justice predominant, could Cicero have hoped to prevail by such defences as that of Milo and fifty-six others, where the argument is merely fanciful—such a Hein-gespinst as might be applauded with 'very good!' 'bravo!' in any mock trial like that silly one devised by Dean Swift.

The slowness and obtuseness of the Romans to pathos appears à priori in their amphitheatre, and its tendency to put out the theatre; secondly, à posteriori, in the fact that their theatre was put out; and also, à posteriori, in the coarseness of their sensibilities to real distresses unless costumed and made sensible as well as intelligible. The grossness of this demand, which proceeded even so far as pinching to elicit a cry, is beyond easy credit to men of their time.

The narrow range of the Greek intellect, always revolving through seven or eight centuries about a few memorable examples—from the Life of Themistocles to Zeno or Demosthenes.

The Grecian glories of every kind seem sociable and affable, courting sympathy. The Jewish seem malignantly αυταρκεις.

But just as Paganism respected only rights of action, possession, etc., Christianity respects a far higher scale of claims, viz., as to the wounds to feelings, to deep injury, though not grounded in anything measurable or expoundable by external results. Man! you have said that which you were too proud and obstinate to unsay, which has lacerated some heart for thirty years that had perhaps secretly and faithfully served you and yours. Christianity lays hold on that as a point of conscience, if not of honour, to make amends, if in no other way, by remorse.

As to the tears of Œdipus in the crises. I am compelled to believe that Sophocles erred as regarded nature; for in cases so transcendent as this Greek nature and English nature could not differ. In the great agony on Mount Œta, Hercules points the pity of his son Hyllus to the extremity of torment besieging him on the humiliating evidence of the tears which they extorted from him. 'Pity me,' says he, 'that weep with sobs like a girl: a thing that no one could have charged upon the man' (pointing to himself); 'but ever without a groan I followed out to the end my calamities.' Now, on the contrary, on the words of the oracle, that beckoned away with impatient sounds Œdipus from his dear sublime Antigone, Œdipus is made to weep.

But this is impossible. Always the tears arose, and will arise, on the relaxation of the torment and in the rear of silent anguish on its sudden suspense, amidst a continued headlong movement; and also, in looking back, tears, unless checked, might easily arise. But never during the torment: on the rack there are no tears shed, and those who suffered on the scaffold never yet shed tears, unless it may have been at some oblique glance at things collateral to their suffering, as suppose a sudden glimpse of a child's face which they had loved in life.

Is not every αιων of civilization an inheritance from a previous state not so high? Thus, e.g., the Romans, with so little of Christian restraint, would have perished by reaction of their own vices, but for certain prejudices and follies about trade, manufacture, etc., and but for oil on their persons to prevent contagion. Now, this oil had been, I think, a secret bequeathed from some older and higher civilization long since passed away. We have it not, but neither have we so much needed it. Soon, however, we shall restore the secret by science more perfect.

Was Christianity meant to narrow or to widen the road to future happiness? If I were translated to some other planet, I should say:

1. No; for it raised a far higher standard—ergo, made the realization of this far more difficult.

2. Yes; for it introduced a new machinery for realizing this standard: (first) Christ's atonement, (second) grace.

But, according to some bigots (as Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne), as cited by Coleridge, Christianity first opened any road at all. Yet, surely they forget that, if simply to come too early was the fatal bar to their claims in the case, Abraham, the father of the faithful, could not benefit.

Yesterday, Thursday, October 21 (1843), I think, or the day before, I first perceived that the first great proof of Christianity is the proof of Judaism, and the proof of that lies in the Jehovah. What merely natural man capable of devising a God for himself such as the Jewish?

Of all eradications of this doctrine (of human progress), the most difficult is that connected with the outward shows—in air, in colouring, in form, in grouping of the great elements composing the furniture of the heavens and the earth. It is most difficult, even when confining one's attention to the modern case, and neglecting the comparison with the ancient, at all to assign the analysis of those steps by which to us Christians (but never before) the sea and the sky and the clouds and the many inter-modifications of these, A, B, C, D, and again the many interactions of the whole, the sun (S.), the moon (M.), the noon (N. S.)—the breathless, silent noon—the gay afternoon—the solemn glory of sunset—the dove-like glimpse of Paradise in the tender light of early dawn—by which these obtain a power utterly unknown, undreamed of, unintelligible to a Pagan. If we had spoken to Plato—to Cicero—of the deep pathos in a sunset, would he—would either—have gone along with us? The foolish reader thinks, Why, perhaps not, not altogether as to the quantity—the degree of emotion. Doubtless, it is undeniable that we moderns have far more sensibility to the phenomena and visual glories of this world which we inhabit. And it is possible that, reflecting on the singularity of this characteristic badge worn by modern civilization, he may go so far as to suspect that Christianity has had something to do with it. But, on seeking to complete the chain which connects them, he finds himself quite unable to recover the principal link.

Now, it will prove, after all, even for myself who have exposed and revealed these new ligatures by which Christianity connects man with awful interests in the world, a most insurmountable task to assign the total nidus in which this new power resides, or the total phenomenology through which that passes to and fro. Generally it seems to stand thus: God reveals Himself to us more or less dimly in vast numbers of processes; for example, in those of vegetation, animal growth, crystallization, etc. These impress us not primarily, but secondarily on reflection, after considering the enormity of changes worked annually, and working even at the moment we speak. Then, again, other arrangements throw us more powerfully upon the moral qualities of God; e.g., we see the fence, the shell, the covering, varied in ten million ways, by which in buds and blossoms He insures the ultimate protection of the fruit. What protection, analogous to this, has He established for animals; or, taking up the question in the ideal case, for man, the supreme of His creatures? We perceive that He has relied upon love, upon love strengthened to the adamantine force of insanity or delirium, by the mere aspect of utter, utter helplessness in the human infant. It is not by power, by means visibly developed, that this result is secured, but by means spiritual and 'transcendental' in the highest degree.

The baseness and incorrigible ignobility of the Oriental mind is seen in the radical inability to appreciate justice when brought into collision with the royal privileges of rulers that represent the nation. Not only, for example, do Turks, etc., think it an essential function of royalty to cut off heads, but they think it essential to the consummation of this function that the sacrifice should rest upon caprice known and avowed. To suppose it wicked as a mere process of executing the laws would rob it of all its grandeur. It would stand for nothing. Nay, even if the power were conceded, and the sovereign should abstain from using it of his own free will and choice, this would not satisfy the wretched Turk. Blood, lawless blood—a horrid Moloch, surmounting a grim company of torturers and executioners, and on the other side revelling in a thousand unconsenting women—this hideous image of brutal power and unvarnished lust is clearly indispensable to the Turk as incarnating the representative grandeur of his nation. With this ideal ever present to the Asiatic and Mohammedan mind, no wonder that even their religion needs the aid of the sword and bloodshed to secure conversion.

In the Spectator is mentioned, as an Eastern apologue, that a vizier who (like Chaucer's Canace) had learned the language of birds used it with political effect to his sovereign. The sultan had demanded to know what a certain reverend owl was speechifying about to another owl distantly related to him. The vizier listened, and reported that the liberal old owl was making a settlement upon his daughter, in case his friend's son should marry her, of a dozen ruined villages. Loyally long life to our noble sultan! I shall, my dear friend, always have a ruined village at your service against a rainy day, so long as our present ruler reigns and desolates.

Obliviscor jam injurias tuas, Clodia.—This is about the most barefaced use of the rhetorical trick—viz., to affect not to do, to pass over whilst actually doing all the while—that anywhere I have met with.—'Pro Cælio,' p. 234 [p. 35, Volgraff's edition].

Evaserint and comprehenderint.—Suppose they had rushed out, and suppose they had seized Licinus. So I read—not issent.—Ibid., p. 236 [Ibid., p. 44].

Velim vel potius quid nolim dicere.—Aristotle's case of throwing overboard your own property. He vult dicere, else he could not mean, yet nonvult, for he is shocked at saying such things of Clodia.—Ibid., p. 242 [Ibid., p. 49].

2.—MORAL AND PRACTICAL

Morality.—That Paley's principle does not apply to the higher morality of Christianity is evident from this: when I seek to bring before myself some ordinary form of wickedness that all men offend by, I think, perhaps, of their ingratitude. The man born to £400 a year thinks nothing of it, compares himself only with those above his own standard, and sees rather a ground of discontent in his £400 as not being £4,000 than any ground of deep thankfulness. Now, this being so odious a form of immorality, should—by Paley—terminate in excessive evil. On the contrary, it is the principle, the very dissatisfaction which God uses for keeping the world moving (how villainous the form—these 'ings'!).

All faith in the great majority is, and ought to be, implicit. That is, your faith is not unrolled—not separately applied to each individual doctrine—but is applied to some individual man, and on him you rely. What he says, you say; what he believes, you believe. Now, he believes all these doctrines, and you implicitly through him. But what I chiefly say as the object of this note is, that the bulk of men must believe by an implicit faith. Ergo, decry it not.

You delude yourself, Christian theorist, with the idea of offences that else would unfit you for heaven being washed out by repentance. But hearken a moment. Figure the case of those innumerable people that, having no temptation, small or great, to commit murder, would have committed it cheerfully for half-a-crown; that, having no opening or possibility for committing adultery, would have committed it in case they had. Now, of these people, having no possibility of repentance (for how repent of what they have not done?), and yet ripe to excess for the guilt, what will you say? Shall they perish because they might have been guilty? Shall they not perish because the potential guilt was not, by pure accident, accomplished in esse?

Here is a mistake to be guarded against. If you ask why such a man, though by nature gross or even Swift-like in his love of dirty ideas, yet, because a gentleman and moving in corresponding society, does not indulge in such brutalities, the answer is that he abstains through the modifications of the sympathies. A low man in low society would not be doubtful of its reception; but he, by the anticipations of sympathy (a form that should be introduced as technically as Kant's anticipations of perception), feels it would be ill or gloomily received. Well now, I, when saying that a man is altered by sympathy so as to think that, through means of this power, which otherwise he would not think, shall be interpreted of such a case as that above. But wait; there is a distinction: the man does not think differently, he only acts as if he thought differently. The case I contemplate is far otherwise; it is where a man feels a lively contempt or admiration in consequence of seeing or hearing such feelings powerfully expressed by a multitude, or, at least, by others which else he would not have felt. Vulgar people would sit for hours in the presence of people the most refined, totally unaware of their superiority, for the same reason that most people (if assenting to the praise of the Lord's Prayer) would do so hyper-critically, because its real and chief beauties are negative.

Not only is it false that my understanding is no measure or rule for another man, but of necessity it is so, and every step I take towards truth for myself is a step made on behalf of every other man.

We doubt if the world in the sense of a synthesis of action—the procession and carrying out of ends and purposes—could consist with the αντι-world (in a religious sense). Men who divide all into pious people and next to devils see in such a state of evil the natural tendency (as in all other monstrous evils—which this must be if an evil at all) to correction and redress. But now assume a man, sober, honourable, cheerful, healthy, active, occupied all day long in toilsome duties (or what he believes duties) for ends not selfish; this man has never had a thought of death, hell, etc., and looking abroad on those who dwell in such contemplations, he regards them sincerely, not unkindly or with contempt; partially he respects them, but he looks on them as under a monstrous delusion, in a fever, in a panic, as in a case of broken equilibrium. Now he is right. And, moreover, secondly, two other feelings or suspicions come on, (1) of hypocrisy, (2) of the violation of inner shame in publishing the most awful private feelings.

The Tendency of a Good Fortune inherited.—I know not that any man has reason to wish a sufficient patrimonial estate for his son. Much to have something so as to start with an advantage. But the natural consequence of having a full fortune is to become idle and vapid. For, on asking what a young man has that he can employ himself upon, the answer would be, 'Oh! why, those pursuits which presuppose solitude.' At once you feel this to be hollow nonsense. Not one man in ten thousand has powers to turn solitude into a blessing. They care not, e.g., for geometry; and the cause is chiefly that they have been ill taught in geometry; and the effect is that geometry must and will languish, if treated as a mere amateur pursuit. So of any other. Secondly, yet of Englishmen I must say that beyond all nations a man so situated does not, in fact, become idle. He it is, and his class, that discharge the public business of each county or district. Thirdly: And in the view, were there no other, one sees at once the use of fox-hunting, let it be as boisterous as you please. Is it not better to be boisterous than gossip-ridden, eaves-dropping, seeking aliment for the spirits in the petty scandal of the neighbourhood?

'He' (The Times) 'declares that the poorest artisan has a greater stake than they' ('the Landed Interest') 'in the prosperity of the country, and is, consequently, more likely to give sound advice. His exposition of the intimate connection existing between the welfare of the poor workman and the welfare of the country is both just and admirable. But he manifestly underrates the corresponding relations of the landowners, and wholly omits to show, even if the artisan's state were the greatest, how his opinions are likely to be most valuable. To suppose that a man is necessarily the best judge in whatever concerns him most is a sad non-sequitur; for if self-interest ensured wisdom, no one would ever go wrong in anything. Every man would be his own minister, and every invalid would be his own best physician. The wounded limbs of the community are the best judges of the pain they suffer; but it is the wise heads of the community that best can apply a remedy that best can cure the wound without causing it to break out in another quarter. Poverty is blind; but the upper classes "education has enlightened, and habit made foreseeing."'

We live in times great from the events and little from the character of the actors. Every month summons us to the spectacle of some new perfidy in the leaders of parties and the most conspicuous public servants; and the profligacy which we charge upon the statesmen of the seventeenth century has revolved in full measure upon our own days.

Justifications of Novels.—The two following justifications of novels occur to me. Firstly, that if some dreadful crisis awaited a ship of passengers at the line—where equally the danger was mysterious and multiform, the safety mysterious and multiform—how monstrous if a man should say to a lady, 'What are you reading?' 'Oh, I'm reading about our dreadful crisis, now so near'; and he should answer, 'Oh, nonsense! read something to improve your mind; read about Alexander the Great, about Spurius Ahala, about Caius Gracchus, or, if you please, Tiberius.' But just such nonsense it is, when people ridicule reading romances in which the great event of the fiction is the real great event of a female life.

There are others, you say—she loses a child. Yes, that's a great event. But that arises out of this vast equinoctial event.

Secondly, as all things are predisposed to the natures which must be surrounded by them, so we may see that the element of social evolution of character, manners, caprices, etc., has been adapted to the vast mass of human minds. It is a mean element, you say. The revelations of Albert Smith, Dickens, etc., are essentially mean, vulgar, plebeian, not only in an aristocratic sense, but also in a philosophical sense. True, but the minds that are to live and move in it are also mean, essentially mean. Nothing grand in them? Yes, doubtless in the veriest grub as to capacity, but the capacity is undeveloped.

Ergo, as to the intrigue or fable, and as to the conduct or evolution of this fable—novels must be the chief natural resource of woman.

Moral Certainty.—As that a child of two years (or under) is not party to a plot. Now, this would allow a shade of doubt—a child so old might cry out or give notice.

This monstrous representation that the great war with France (1803-15) had for its object to prevent Napoleon from sitting on the throne of France—which recently, in contempt of all truth and common-sense, I have so repeatedly seen advanced—throws a man profoundly on the question of what was the object of that war. Surely, in so far as we are concerned, the matter was settled at Amiens in the very first year of the century. December, 1799, Napoleon had been suffered by the unsteady public opinion of France—abhorring a master, and yet sensible that for the chief conscious necessity of France, viz., a developer of her latent martial powers, she must look for a master or else have her powers squandered—to mount the consular throne. He lived, he could live, only by victorious war. Most perilous was the prospect for England. In the path which not Napoleon, but France, was now preparing to tread, and which was the path of Napoleon no otherwise than that he was the tool of France, was that servitor who must gratify her grand infirmity or else be rapidly extinguished himself, unhappily for herself, England was the main counter-champion. The course of honour left to England was too fatally the course of resistance. Resistance to what? To Napoleon personally? Not at all; but to Napoleon as pledged by his destiny to the prosecution of a French conquering policy. That personally England had no hostility to Napoleon is settled by the fact that she had at Amiens cheerfully conceded the superior power. Under what title? would have been the most childish of demurs. That by act she never conceded the title of emperor was the mere natural diplomatic result of never having once been at peace with Napoleon under that title. Else it was a point of entire indifference. Granting the consulship, she had granted all that could be asked. And what she opposed was the determined war course of Napoleon and the schemes of ultra-Polish partition to which Napoleon had privately tempted her under circumstances of no such sense as existed and still exist for Russia. This policy, as soon as exposed, and not before bitter insults to herself, England resisted. And therefore it is that at this day we live. But as to Napoleon, as apart from the policy of Napoleon, no childishness can be wilder.