Cobwebs of Thought | Page 3

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, Nature, Heredity, Education are the same difficulties, expressed in different words. Heredity is a circumstance, which has to be reckoned with, but we have to investigate, not circumstances, but results. Here is a living complex mind,