Томас де Квинси
The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1
In such a state, suppose it confirmed and now threatening towards a total alienation from the truth once delivered, what could avail to save them? Nothing but affliction in the heaviest form. Vain it was now to hope for a cheaper restoration, since the very first lightening of their judicial punishment would seem to them a reason for relapsing, by seeming to argue that there had been two principles. It was but a false alarm, they would say, after all. Affliction, therefore, was past all substitution or remedy. Yet even this case, this prostration to the ground, had been met for a thousand years by God's servants.
If I have shown that quickening spirit which, diffusing itself through all thoughts, schemata, possible principles, motives of sensibility, and forms of taste, has differenced the pre-Christian man from the post-Christian; if I have detected that secret word which God subtly introduced into this world, kept in a state of incubation for two millennia, then with the flames and visible agency of a volcanic explosion forced into infinite disruption, caused to kindle into a general fire—that word by which sadness is spread over the face of things, but also infinite grandeur—then may I rightly lay this as one chapter of my Emendation of Human Knowledge.
The same thing precisely takes place in literature as in spiritual things. When a man is entangled and suffocated in business, all relating to that which shrinks up to a point—and observe, I do not mean that being conceived as a tent above his head it contracts, but that, viewed as a body at a distance, it shrinks up to a point, and really vanishes as a real thing—when this happens, having no subjective existence at all, but purely and intensely objective, he misconceives it just in the same way as a poor ignorant man misconceives learning or knowledge; fancying, e.g., like Heylius senior, that he ought to know the road out of the wood in which they were then entangled.
It is probable that Adam meant only the unity of man as to his nature, which also is meant by making all men of one blood. Similarly Boeckh—εν γενει—which does not mean that Gods and men are the same, but that of each the separate race has unity in itself. So the first man, Adam, will mean the earliest race of men, perhaps spread through thousands of years.
It is a violent case of prejudice, this ordinary appeal of Bossuet, 'Qu'ont gagné les philosophes avec leurs discours pompeux?' (p. 290). Now how should that case have been tried thoroughly before the printing of books? Yet it may be said the Gospel was so tried. True, but without having the power of fully gratifying itself through the whole range of its capability. That was for a later time, hence a new proof of its reality.
An Analogy.—1. I have somewhere read that a wicked set of Jews, probably, when rebuked for wickedness, replied, 'What! are we not the peculiar people of God? Strange, then, if we may not have a privilege more than others to do wrong!' The wretches fancied that to be the people of God—the chosen people—implied a license to do wrong, and had a man told them, No, it was just the other way; they were to be better than others, absolutely, they would have trembled with wrath.
2. Precisely the same idea, I am sure, lurks in many minds as to repentance. It is odious to think of, this making God the abettor and encourager of evil; but I am sure it is so, viz., that, because God has said He will have mercy on the penitent, they fancy that, as the chief consequence from that doctrine, they may commit sins without anxiety; though others, not under the Christian privilege, would be called to account for the same sin, penitent or not penitent. But they—such is their thought—are encouraged to sin by the assurance that repentance will always be open to them, and this they may pursue at leisure.
Now, if a man should say: 'But, my friends, this means real penitence;' they would reply, 'Oh, but we mean real penitence.' 'Well, if you do, you must know that that is not always possible.' 'Not possible!' Then make them understand that; they will roar with wrath, and protest against it as no privilege at all.
The literal interpretation of the Mosaic Cosmogony is the very expression of a barbarian mind and people, relying so far on magic as to make all natural process of generation or production impossible, relying so far on natural processes as to make the fiat of supreme power evidently inapplicable. It is exactly the Minerva of the Pagans draggled in her skirts.
Idolatry.—It is not only a mere blind crotchet of Isaiah's (Jeremiah's?) to ridicule idols—utterly wide of any real imperfection, but also it misses all that really might be bad. The true evil is not to kindle the idea of Apollo by an image or likeness, but to worship Apollo, i.e., a god to be in some sense false—belonging to a system connected with evil. That may be bad; but there can be no separate evil in reanimating the idea of this Apollo by a picture.
I have observed many times, but never could understand in any rational sense, the habit of finding a confirmation of the Bible in mere archæologic facts occasionally brought to light and tallying with the Biblical records. As in the Pharaonic and Egyptian usages, and lately in the case of Nimrod, a great collateral confirmation of Ezekiel has been fancied. But how? Supposing Ezekiel to have recited accurately the dimensions of Nineveh, how should that make him a true prophet? Or supposing him a false one, what motive should that furnish for mismeasuring Nineveh? The Gospels appear to have been written long after the events, and when controversies or variations had arisen about them, they have apparently been modified and shaped to meet those disputes.
The sun stands still. I am persuaded that this means no such incredible miracle as is ordinarily imagined. The interpretation arises from misconceiving an Oriental expression, and a forcible as well as natural one. Of all people the Jews could least mistake the nature of the sun and moon, as though by possibility they could stand in a relation to a particular valley: that the sun could have stood still in Gibeon, and the moon in Ajalon. Since they viewed sun and moon as two great lights, adequated and corresponding to day and night, that alone shows that they did not mean any objective solstice of the hour, for else why in Ajalon? Naturally it would be a phenomenon chiefly made known to the central sanctity of that God whose miraculous interposition had caused so unknown an arrest of ordinary nature; Jerusalem was not then known, it was Jebus, a city of Jebusites; and the fact which subsequently created its sanctity did not occur till more than four centuries afterwards (viz., on the threshing-floor of Araunah). But Shiloh existed, and Horeb, and Sinai, and the graves of the Patriarchs. And all those places would have expounded the reference of the miracle, would have traced it to the very source of its origin; so as to show not then only, not to the contemporaries only, but (which would be much more important) to after generations, who might suspect some mistake in their ancestors as explaining their meaning, or in themselves as understanding it. What it really means, I am persuaded, is merely to express that the day was, of all historical days, the most important. What! do people never reflect on the το positive of their reading? If they did, they would remember that the very idea of a great cardinal event, as of the foundation of the Olympiads, was as an arrest, a pausing, of time; causing you to hang and linger on that time. And the grandeur of this Jewish Waterloo in which God established possessions for His people and executed an earthly day of judgment on the ancient polluters (through perhaps a thousand years) of the sacred land (already sacred as the abode and burying-place of His first servants under a covenant) was expressed by saying that the day lingered, arrested itself by a burthen of glorious revolution so mighty as this great day of overthrow. For remember this: Would not God have changed Pharaoh's heart, so intractable, by such a miracle, had it been at all open to His eternal laws? Whereas, if you say, Aye, but on that account why grant even so much distinction to the day as your ancestor does? answer, it was the final-cause day.
The English Church pretends to give away the Bible without note or comment, or—which, in fact, is the meaning—any impulse or bias to the reader's mind. The monstrous conceit of the Protestant Churches, viz., the right of private judgment (which is, in effect, like the right to talk nonsense, or the right to criticise Sir John Herschel's books without mathematics), is thus slavishly honoured. Yet all is deception. Already in the translation at many hundred points she has laid a restraining bias on the reader, already by the division of verses, already by the running abstracts over the Prophets, she has done this.
Can the power adequated to a generation of minds, or to a succession of many generations, find its comprehension in an individual? Can the might which overflows the heaven of heavens be confined within a local residence like that which twice reared itself by its foundations, and three times by its battlements, above the threshing-floor of Araunah?33 Of that mystery, of that local circumscription—in what sense it was effected, in what sense not effected, we know nothing. But this by mere human meditation, this profound difficulty we may humanly understand and measure, viz., the all but impossibility of reaching the man who stands removed to an extent of fifteen centuries. But here comes in the unspiritual mind which thinks only of facts—yet mark me so far, Rome by an augury of wicked gods stretched to a period of 1,200 years. Yet how open to doubt in one sense! Not, I am sure, in any sense understood by man, but I doubt not in the ominous sense intended. Changed in all things essential, she was yet a mighty sceptred potentate for the world until her dependency on Attila's good-will and forbearance. 444 after Christ added to 752 b. c. complete the period. But period for what? For whom? For a great idea that could not be lost. The conception could not perish if the execution perished. But, next think of the temptation to mythus. And, finally, of God's plan unrealized, His conceptions unanswered. We should remember that by the confusion introduced into the economy of internal Divine operations there is a twofold difficulty placed between the prayer and the attainment of the prayer. 1st, the deflection, slight though it may seem to the man, from the state of perfect simplicity and of natural desire; 2ndly, the deflection of the object desired from the parallelism with the purposes now became necessary to God in order to remedy abnormous shifting of the centre by man. And again, in the question of the language of Scripture, I see the same illustration. Sir William Jones, in a fit of luxurious pleasure-giving, like Gibbons' foolish fit34 as to the Archbishop of Carthagena, praises the language of Scripture as unattainable. I say, No. This is hypocrisy. It is no dishonour if we say of God that, in the sense meant by Sir William Jones, it is not possible for Him to speak better than powerful writers can speak. They have the same language as their instrument, and as impossible would it be for Apollonius or Sir William Jones to perform a simple process of addition better than an ordinary keeper of a shop. In the schemata, because in the original ideas, God says indeed what man cannot, for these are peculiar to God; but who before myself has shown what they were? As to mere language, however, and its management, we have the same identically. And when a language labours under an infirmity, as all do, not God Himself could surmount it! He is compromised, coerced, by the elements of language; but what of that? It is an element of man's creating. And just as in descending on man by His answers God is defeated or distorted many times by the foul atmosphere in which man has thrown himself, so in descending upon the mind (unless by dreams, or some language that he may have kept pure), God is thwarted and controlled by the imperfections of human language. And, apart from the ideas, I myself could imitate the Scriptural language—I know its secret, its principle of movement which lies chiefly in high abstractions—far better than is done in most parts of the Apocrypha.
The power lies in the spirit—the animating principle; and verily such a power seems to exist. And the fact derived from the holiness, the restraints even upon the Almighty's power through His own holiness, goodness, and wisdom, are so vast that, instead of the unlimited power which hypocritical glorifiers ascribe to Him by way of lip-honour, in reaching man ex-abundantibus in so transcendent a way that mere excess of means would have perplexed a human choice, on the contrary, I am persuaded that besides the gulf of 1,500 years so as to hold on, so as to hold hard, and to effect the translation of His will unaltered, uncorrupted, through the violent assaults of idolatries all round, and the perverse, headstrong weakness of a naturally unbelieving people,35 down to the time of Christ from the time of Moses—there was the labour hardly to be effected; and why? I have always been astonished at men treating such a case as a simple original problem as to God. But far otherwise. It was a problem secondary to a change effected by man. His rays, His sun, still descended as ever; but when they came near to the foul atmosphere of man, no ray could pierce unstained, unrefracted, or even untwisted. It was distorted so as to make it hardly within the limits of human capacity (observe, the difficulty was in the human power to receive, to sustain, to comprehend—not in the Divine power to radiate, to receive what was directed to it). Often I have reflected on the tremendous gulf of separation placed between man, by his own act, and all the Divine blessings which could visit him. (This is illustrated by prayer; for, while we think it odd that so many prayers of good men for legitimate objects of prayer should seem to be unanswered, we nevertheless act as to our prayers in a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, as though to our sense they had been answered in some ineffable way, and all the while our conduct, to speak strictly, lies outside all this, and remains wholly uninfluenced by it).
These ideas of God have life only by their own inherent power: yet what risk that Jews should lapse into supposing themselves separately a favoured people? By this very error they committed the rebellion against which they had been warned—in believing that they only were concerned in receiving a supernatural aid of redemption: thus silently substituting their own merits for the Divine purposes. All which did in fact happen. But their errors were overruled, else how could the human race be concerned in their offences, errors, or ministries? The Jews forgot what we moderns forget, that they were no separate objects of favour with God, but only a means of favour.
What occasion to 'argal-bargal' about why God did not sooner accomplish the scheme of Christianity? For besides that, 1st, possibly the scheme in its expansion upon earth required a corresponding expansion elsewhere; 2ndly, it is evident even to our human sense that none but the most childish eudamonist, whose notion of happiness is that of lazy luxury, would think of cramming men, bidding them open their mouths, and at once drugging them with a sensual opium (as all blessing must be without previous and commensurate elevation to the level of that blessing); 3rdly, the physical nature of the evil to be undone was such as would not have been (objectively would not have been, but still less could it subjectively have been) for the conception of man that dreadful mystery which it really is, had the awful introversion been measured back by fewer steps; 4thly, and finally, it seems at first sight shocking to say of God that He cannot do this and this, but it is not so. Without adverting to the dark necessities that compass our chaotic sense when we ascend by continual abstraction to the absolute, without entangling ourselves vainly in those wildernesses that no created intellect can range or measure—even one sole attribute of God, His holiness, makes it as impossible for Him to proceed except by certain steps as it would be impossible for a man, though a free agent, and apparently master, as he feels and thinks, of his own life, to cut his throat while in a state of pleasurable health both of mind and body.
5.—Political, etc
Sir Robert Walpole, as to patriots, was like a man who has originally, from his nursery up, been thoroughly imbued with the terror of ghosts, which by education and example afterwards he has been encouraged to deny. Half he does disbelieve, and, under encouraging circumstances, he does disbelieve it stoutly. But at every fresh plausible alarm his early faith intrudes with bitter hatred against a class of appearances that, after all, he is upon system pledged to hold false. Nothing can be more ludicrous than his outcry, and his lashing of his own tail to excite his courage and his wrath and his denial—than his challenge of the lurking patriots in what he conceives the matter of frauds on the revenue. He assaults them as if he saw them standing in a row behind the door, and yet he pummels them for being mere men of the shades—horrible mockeries. Had there been any truth in their existence, surely, so strongly as they muster by their own report, some one or other of this fact should have given me warning—should have exposed the frauds. But no, all are silent as the grave. But here Sir Robert Walpole is as much wrong as if, doubting the value or power of Methodist preachers, he should make it the test of their useful existence that, as often as a highwayman, a footpad, started out of the wayside, from the other side should start a Methodist preacher to reason with him and to convert him.
Are the Whigs less aristocratic than the Tories? Not at all. In tendency by principle they are the same. The real difference is not in the creed, in the groundwork, but in certain points of practice and method.
'He took his stand upon the truth'—said by me of Sir Robert Peel—might seem to argue a lower use of 'the truth,' but in fact it is as happens to the article the itself: you say the guard, speaking of a coach; the key, speaking of a trunk or watch, i.e., the as by usage appropriated to every coach, watch, trunk. So here the truth, namely, of the particular perplexity.
The Sepoy mutiny will be best understood if you suppose the Roman emperors, from Romulus to Augustus, from the Alban Fathers down to the Ostrogoths—the whole line of a thousand years crowded into two.
Trunkmakers may be great men: they clearly have the upper hand of authors whom all the world admits to be great men. For the trunkmaker is the principal in the concern—he makes the trunk, whereas the author, quite a secondary artist, furnishes only the linings.
Case of Casuistry.—Wraxall justly notices that errors like Prince Rupert's from excess of courage, however ruinous, are never resented by a country. Ergo the inference that prudence would be, always if in Byng's or Lord St. German's cases, in a matter of doubt held to be bold fighting; and yet in morals is that an allowable position?
6.—Personal Confessions, etc
Avaunt, ye hypocrites! who make a whining pretence, according to a fixed rule, of verbally uttering thanks to God for every chastisement, and who say this is good for you. So do not I, being upright, and God seeing my heart, who also sees that I murmur not; but if it were not good in the end, yet I submit. He is not offended that with upright sincerity I give no thanks for it. And I say that, unless a man perceives the particular way in which it has been good for him, he cannot sincerely, truly, or so as not to mock God with his lips, give thanks simply on an à priori principle, though, of course, he may submit in humbleness.
I do not believe that the faith of any man in the apparent fact that he will never again see such a person (i.e., by being removed by death) is real. I believe that the degree of faith in this respect is regulated by an original setting or fixing of our nature quite unconscious to ourselves. So, again, I believe that hope is never utterly withdrawn, despair is never absolute. And again, I believe that, at the lowest nadir, the resource of dying as a means of escape and translation to new chances and openings is lodged in every man far down below the sunlights of consciousness. He feels that his death is not final; were it otherwise he could not rush at the escape so lightly. Indeed, were his fate fixed immutably, I feel that it would not have been left possible for him to commit suicide.
Justice.—You say in the usual spirit of vanity, Y or X has the same degree of the spirit of justice as V. This is easily said, but the test is, what will he do for it? Suppose a man to propose rewards exclusively to those who assisted at a fire, then X and Y, suppose, have equally seen that many did not assist, even refused to do so. But X perhaps will shrink from exposing them; V will encounter any hatred for truth and justice by exposing the undeserving.
It is a foolish thing to say 'Hard words break no bones.' How impossible to call up from the depths of forgotten times all the unjust or shocking insinuations, all the scornful refusals to understand one aright, etc. But surely an injury is nothing to them; for that may be measured, made sensible, and cannot be forgotten, whereas the other case is like the dispute, 'Is he wrong as a poet?' compared with this, 'Is he wrong as a geometrician?' There need be no anger with the latter dispute; it is capable of decision.
Then, again, a heart so lacerated is required by Christianity to forgive the lacerator. Hard it is to do, and imperfectly it is ever done, except through the unbuckling of human nature under higher inspirations working together with time.
Instead of being any compliment it is the most profound insult, the idea one can write something rapidly. It is no homage to the writer; it is villainous insensibility to the written.
Two subjects of stories occur to me. 1. For my Arabian tales, founded on the story of the Minyas Treasure-House at Orchomenus. 2. Another of an abbess, who was such by dispensation, but had been married; her accomplished son succeeds in carrying off a nun. She labours for the discovery and punishment of the unknown criminal, till she learns who he is; then parting from him for ever in the early dawn, she, sacrificing to a love that for her was to produce only hatred and the total destruction of the total hopes of her ageing life. Splendide Mendax! and the more angel she.
I find the double effect as the reason of my now reading again with profit every book, however often read in earlier times, that by and through my greater knowledge and the more numerous questions growing out of that knowledge, I have deeper interest, and by and through this deeper interest I have a value put upon those questions, and I have other questions supervening through the interest alone. The interest is incarnated in the wider knowledge; the knowledge is incarnated in the interest, or at least the curiosity and questions.
Upon trying to imprint upon my memory that at such a period the Argives ceased to be called Pelasgi, and were henceforward called Danai, I felt how impracticable (and doubtless in their degree injurious, for though an infinitesimal injury only as regards any single act doubtless, yet, per se, by tendency doubtless all blank efforts of the memory unsupported by the understanding are bad), must be any violent efforts of the memory not falling in with a previous preparedness.
Music.—I am satisfied that music involves a far greater mystery than we are aware of. It is that universal language which binds together all creatures, and binds them by a profounder part of their nature than anything merely intellectual ever could.
It is remarkable (as proving to me the delibility of caste) that the Sudras of Central India, during its vast confusions under the Mahrattas have endeavoured to pass themselves for descendants of the Kshatriyas (or warrior caste) by assuming the sacred thread, also assumed by the Rajpoots, and also by some of the Sikhs.
I never see a vast crowd of faces—at theatres, races, reviews—but one thing makes them sublime to me: the fact that all these people have to die. Strange it is that this multitude of people, so many of them intellectually, but also (which is worse) morally, blind, are without forethought or sense of the realities of life.
Though I love fun, eternal jesting, buffoonery, punning absolutely kills me. Such things derive all their value from being made to intervene well with other things.
This is curious:
Shame, pain, and poverty shall I endure,
When ropes or opium can my ease procure?
This offends nobody, not till you say, 'I'll buy a rope.' But now:
When money's gone, and I no debts can pay,
Self-murder is an honourable way—
though the same essentially, this shocks all men.
I have in the course of my misfortunes fasted for thirty years: a dreadful fate, if it had been to come. But, being past, it is lawful to regard it with satisfaction, as having, like all fasting and mortification, sharpened to an excruciating degree my intellectual faculties. Hence my love and even furor now for mathematics, from which in my youth I fled.
The Arrow Ketch, six guns, is recorded in the Edinburgh Advertiser for June 14th, 1844, as having returned home (to Portsmouth) on Thursday, June 7th, 'after six years and upwards in commission,' most of it surveying the Falkland Islands; 'has lost only two men during this long service, and those from natural causes;' 'never lost a spar, and has ploughed the ocean for upwards of 100,000 miles.'
Anecdotes from Edinburgh Advertiser, for June and May. The dog of a boy that died paralytic from grief. Little child run over by railway waggon and horse, clapping its hands when the shadow passed away, leaving it unhurt. Little girl of six committing suicide from fear of a stepmother's wrath.
To note the dire reactions (?) of evils: young thieves growing to old ones, no sewers, damp, famine-engendering, desolating and wasting plagues or typhus fever, want of granaries or mendacious violence destroying food, civil feuds coming round in internecine wars, and general desolations, and, as in Persia, eight millions occupying the homesteads of three hundred millions. Here, if anywhere, is seen the almighty reactions through which the cycle of human life, oscillating, moves.
In the speech of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh (reported on June 14th, 1844), it is recited that boys 'left to stroll about the streets and closes,' acquire habits so fixed, if not of vice, at least of idleness, that in consequence of their not being trained to some kind of discipline in their early years, the habit of vagabondizing acquires such power that it is uncontrollable. And how apt and forcible was that quotation in the place assigned it: 'If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not, doth not He that pondereth the heart, consider it?'—consider it, regard it, make account of it.
Manners.—The making game of a servant before company—a thing impossible to well-bred people. Now observe how this is illustrative of H– Street.
I confess myself wholly at a loss to comprehend the objections of the Westminster reviewer and even of my friend Dr. Nichol, to my commentary on the strange appearance in Orion. The reviewer says that this appearance (on which he seems to find my language incomprehensible) had been dispersed by Lord Rosse's telescope. True, or at least so I hear. But for all this, it was originally created by that telescope. It was in the interval between the first report and the subsequent reports from Lord Rosse's telescope that I made my commentary. But in the case of contradiction between two reports, more accurate report I have not. As regards the reviewer, there had been no time for this, because the book, which he reviews, is a simple reprint in America, which he knows I had had no opportunity of revising. But Dr. Nichol perplexes me. That a new stage of progress had altered the appearances, as doubtless further stages will alter them, concerns me nothing, though referring to a coming republication; for both alike apparently misunderstood the case as though it required a real phenomenon for its basis. To understand the matter as it really is, I beg to state this case. Wordsworth in at least four different places (one being in the fourth book of 'The Excursion,' three others in Sonnets) describes most impressive appearances amongst the clouds: a monster, for instance, with a bell-hanging air, a dragon agape to swallow a golden spear, and various others of affecting beauty. Would it have been any just rebuke to Wordsworth if some friend had written to him: 'I regret most sincerely to say that the dragon and the golden spear had all vanished before nine o'clock'? So, again, of Hawthorne's face on a rock. The very beauty of such appearances is in part their evanescence.
To be or not to be. 'Not to be, by G–' said Garrick. This is to be cited in relation to Pope's—
'Man never is, but always to be blessed.'
Political Economy.—Which of these two courses shall I take? 1. Shall I revise, extend, condense my logic of Political Economy, embodying every doctrine (and numbering them) which I have amended or re-positioned, and introduce them thus in a letter to the Politico-Economical Society: 'Gentlemen, certain ideas fundamental to Political Economy I presented in a book in the endeavour to effect a certain purpose. These were too much intermingled with less elementary ideas in consequence of my defective self-command from a dreadful nervous idea, and thus by interweaving they were overlapped and lost. But I am not disposed to submit to that wrong. I affirm steadily that the foundations of Political Economy are rotten and crazy. I defy, and taking up my stand as a scholar of Aristotle, I defy all men to gainsay the following exposures of folly, one or any of them. And when I show the darkness all round the very base of the hill, all readers may judge how great is that darkness.' Or, 2. Shall I introduce them as a chapter in my Logic?
