Cobwebs of Thought | Page 3

Many persons, for instance, have felt the great influence of
Carlyle, and Ruskin, in their youth. Carlyle could do incalculable good
to some minds by his ethics of work, but irremediable harm to others;
minds have actually become stunted and sterile through that part of his
teaching, which was unsuited to them. Carlyle's temperament checked
their proper development. Youth has a beautiful capacity for trust and
belief, and it accepts everything as equal in goodness and truth from an
author it reverences. The young do not know enough of themselves,
and they do not trust enough to their own instincts to discriminate.
They are dominated and unconsciously suppressed. Ruskin, in his
ethical views of art, and strange doctrines about some old masters, has
done nearly as much harm to susceptible minds as Carlyle. Ruskin

restricted and perverted their art ideals on certain lines as Carlyle
crushed ethical discrimination. Mind have been kept imprisoned for
years, and their development on the lines nature intended them to take,
has been arrested, by the want of belief in their own initiative. What
was inevitable for Ruskin's unique mind was yet wrong for readers,
who agreed to all his theories under the influence of his fascinating
personality, and through the power of his individuality. In life, we
sometimes find we have made a series of mistakes of this sort, before at
last we get glimmerings of what we were intended to be, and we learn
at last the need of having known ourselves, and the vital necessity of
cultivating the atmosphere and colour of that mind of ours, which has
been used merely as a tool to know everything else.
Spiritualists and Theosophists talk of a Dominant Self, and an Astral
body, and of gleams of heavensent insight. Gleams of insight and
dreams do come to us, and teach us truths, which "never can be
proved," and without some such intuitions the soul of man would
indeed be poor,
The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
But the value of the intuitions is relative to the soul which has them;
they cannot be conveyed to any one else, or demonstrated; they can
never become Truths valid to all minds. And these last are the truths we
want if we would make some orderly progress towards a given issue.
And so we resort after all, to science, to see if it can solve the
intellectual riddle of our being. What can it do for us? If we would
really know ourselves, we want a depth of self-analysis; not a pitiful
search for motives, not the superficial probings of a moralist, not the
boundless, limitless, self-absorbed speculations on the nature of self of
the philosopher, not the sympathetic noting of each emotion that
crosses the horizon of the soul--the introspection of the Poet; these will
never teach us the reason why we think and feel on certain lines, and
not on others--these will never explain to us what the mind is, that is in
us--what that strange thing is, which we have tried so vainly to
understand. And without this knowledge how worthless is the work of
the moralist; of what practical use is it for him to endeavour to alter a
man's character, when he does not even know the ingredients that
constitute character, still less the cause why character is good or bad.

Mr. Robert Buchanan said in one of his essays: "I can advance no
scientific knowledge for seeing a great genius in Robert Browning, or a
fine painstaking talent in George Eliot, for thinking George Meredith
almost alone in his power of expressing personal passion, and Walt
Whitman supreme in his power of conveying moral stimulation. I can
take a skeleton to pieces scientifically, but not a living soul. I am
helpless before Mr. Swinburne, or any authentic poet, but quite at my
ease before Macaulay or Professor Aytoun." Mr. Buchanan could
presumably take the last two to pieces and analyse them as if they were
skeletons; but before Swinburne, "the living soul," he is helpless. Now
we want a scientific reason for all this; we want to analyse, not the
skeleton, that has been done often enough, but "the living soul." We
want to know the ingredients of character that constituted Mr.
Buchanan's preferences. What composition gave him his special temper
and character? Why did his mind tend towards Robert Browning, and
away from George Eliot? Why in short did his mind work in the way it
did? The more original the mind, the more its investigation would
repay us. But it must be self-investigation; what we want are facts of
mind, mental data and in order to get them, we must investigate the
living mind All the usual explanations of Temperament,