§2. Practical Concerns and the Wisdom of Sentiment

657. One is that powers of reasoning in any but the most rudimentary way are a somewhat uncommon gift, about as uncommon as a talent for music. Indeed, a much smaller number of persons actually attain to any proficiency in reasoning. But then the exercise of intricate ratiocination requires great energy and prolonged effort, while musical practice is nearly unmixed pleasure, I suppose, for those who do it well. Moreover, owing to several peculiar circumstances, good instruction in reasoning is exceedingly rare. As for what is taught in the colleges under the name of logic, oh dear, perhaps the less said the better. It is true that mathematics teaches one branch of reasoning. That is, indeed, its chief value in education. But how few teachers understand the logic of mathematics! And how few understand the psychology of the puzzled pupil! The pupil meets with a difficulty in Euclid. Two to one the reason is that there is a logical flaw. The boy, however, is conscious only of a mysterious hindrance. What his difficulty is he cannot tell the teacher; the teacher must teach him. Now the teacher probably never really saw the true logic of the passage. But he thinks he does because, owing to long familiarity, he has lost that sense of coming up against an invisible barrier that the boy feels. Had the teacher ever really conquered the logical difficulty himself, of course he would recognize just what it was, and thus would fulfill the first condition, at least, of being helpful. But not having conquered the difficulty, but only having worn out the sense of difficulty by familiarity, he simply cannot understand why the boy should feel any difficulty; and all he can do is to exclaim, »Oh, these stupid, stupid boys!« As if a physician should exclaim, »Oh, these horrid patients, they won't get well!« But suppose, by some extraordinary conjunction of the planets, a really good teacher of reasoning were to be appointed, what would be his first care? It would be to guard his scholars from that malady with which logic is usually infested, so that unless it runs off them like water from a duck, it is sure to make them the very worst of reasoners, namely, unfair

reasoners, and what is worse unconsciously unfair, for the rest of their lives. The good teacher will therefore take the utmost pains to prevent the scholars getting puffed up with their logical acquirements. He will wish to impregnate them with the right way of looking at reasoning before they shall be aware that they have learned anything; and he will not mind giving considerable time to that, for it is worth a great deal. But now come the examiner and the pupil himself. They want results, tangible to them. The teacher is dismissed as a failure, or, if he is allowed another chance, he will take good care to reverse the method of his teaching and give them results — especially, as that is the lazy way. These are some of the causes of there being so few strong reasoners in the world. But allowing for the influence of such causes as well as we can, the fact still remains that comparatively few persons are originally possessed of any but the feeblest modicum of this talent. What is the significance of that? Is it not a plain sign that the faculty of reasoning is not of the first importance to success in life? For were it so, its absence would cause the individual to postpone marriage and so affect his procreation; and thus natural selection would operate to breed the race for vigorous reasoning powers, and they would become common. And the study of characters confirms this conclusion. For though the men who are most extraordinarily successful evidently do reason deeply about the details of their business, yet no ordinary degrees of good success are influenced — otherwise than perhaps favorably — by any lack of great reasoning power. We all know highly successful men, lawyers, editors, scientific men — not to speak of artists — whose great deficiency in this regard is only revealed by some unforeseen accident.

658. The other observation I desired to make about the human reason is that we find people mostly modest enough about qualities which really go to making fine men and women — the courageous man not usually vaunting his courage, nor the modest woman boasting of her modesty, nor the loyal vain of their good faith: the things they are vain about are some insignificant gifts of beauty, or skill of some kind. But beyond all, with the exception of those who, being trained in logic, follow its rules and thus do not trust their direct reasoning powers at all, everybody else ridiculously overrates his own logic, and if he really has superior powers of reason is usually so consumed by conceit that it is far from rare to see a young man completely ruined by it; so that one is sometimes tempted to think, and perhaps truly, that it conduces not only to a man's success from a worldly point of view but to his attaining any real elevation of character to be all but a fool in this regard, provided only he be perfectly aware of his own deficiency. . . .

659. All those modern books which offer new philosophies of religion, at the rate of one every fortnight on the average, are but symptoms of the temporary dissolution of the Christian faith. This appears as soon as we compare them with the works of religious philosophy of the ages of faith, such as the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas or the Opus Oxoniense of Duns Scotus — the one reproducing without a shadow of mistrust every dogma of the Fathers of the Church, while the other displays a far stouter faith in maintaining that metaphysics has nothing to say either one way or the other concerning any question of religion, but leaves it to be decided by positive testimony or inspiration. The only old book which these modern philosophies of religion really resemble a good deal — except that they lack its terrible earnestness — is the De consolatione philosophiae and it is paying them a high compliment to say so. Boethius, you know, is utterly religionless, but he feels the need of religion and vainly tries to find a substitute for it in philosophy. His first two

books are somewhat inspiring, because they breathe an unconscious religion. But as the work progresses, reasoning enters more and more into the thought, until the last book, which resembles a modern essay much more than all the rest, is a mere diet of bran for the hungered soul.

660. It is hardly necessary to insist here that the highly cultured classes of Christendom — excepting always those families which are so important as to be an object of solicitude on the part of the priests — are nowadays nearly destitute of any religion. It was made perfectly manifest five and twenty years ago or more — no matter for the exact date; it was at a date when men saturated with the mechanical philosophy were still hesitating to separate themselves from the church — when John Tyndall, in the innocence of his scientific heart, proposed to measure the efficacy of prayer by experimental statistics. Instantly, the clergy, one and all, instead of meeting the proposal with the candor with which Elijah met the priests of Baal — though by the way I notice some ingenious persons think his barrels of water were really deodorized kerosene, which for a student of the history of chemistry, would, of itself, seem to be a good enough miracle — instead of thanking Tyndall for the idea, I say, the clergy to a man shrank back in terror, thus conclusively betraying to every eye their own utter disbelief in their own dogma. They pronounced it an impious proposition. But there was nothing more impious in it than in any other sort of inquiry into religion except this — that they feared it would bring all »talkee-talkee« to an end. Although it must be granted that in our country the clergy are by far the most sceptical class of the community, yet where the clergy stood a generation back, the bulk of the highly educated and cultured class stands now.

It is a thousand times better to have no faith at all in God or virtue than to have a hemi-hypocritical faith. . . .