God the Known and God the Unknown | Page 4

occasion for sarcasm; those, on the other hand, who hold that the world
is by this time old enough to be the best judge concerning the
management of its own affairs will scrutinise [sic] this management
with some closeness before they venture to satirise [sic] it; nor will they
do so for long without finding justification for its apparent recklessness;
for we must all fear responsibility upon matters about which we feel we
know but little; on the other hand we must all continually act, and for
the most part promptly. We do so, therefore, with greater security when
we can persuade both ourselves and others that a matter is already
pigeon-holed than if we feel that we must use our own judgment for the
collection, interpretation, and arrangement of the papers which deal
with it. Moreover, our action is thus made to appear as if it received
collective sanction; and by so appearing it receives it. Almost any
settlement, again, is felt to be better than none, and the more nearly a
matter comes home to everyone, the more important is it that it should
be treated as a sleeping dog, and be let to lie, for if one person begins to
open his mouth, fatal developments may arise in the Babel that will
follow.

It is not difficult, indeed, to show that, instead of having reason to
complain of the desire for the postponement of important questions, as
though the world were composed mainly of knaves or fools, such fixity
as animal and vegetable forms possess is due to this very instinct. For if
there had been no reluctance, if there were no friction and vis inertae to
be encountered even after a theoretical equilibrium had been upset, we
should have had no fixed organs nor settled proclivities, but should
have been daily and hourly undergoing Protean transformations, and
have still been throwing out pseudopodia like the amoeba. True, we
might have come to like this fashion of living as well as our more
steady-going system if we had taken to it many millions of ages ago
when we were yet young; but we have contracted other habits which
have become so confirmed that we cannot break with them. We
therefore now hate that which we should perhaps have loved if we had
practised [sic] it. This, however, does not affect the argument, for our
concern is with our likes and dislikes, not with the manner in which
those likes and dislikes have come about. The discovery that organism
is capable of modification at all has occasioned so much astonishment
that it has taken the most enlightened part of the world more than a
hundred years to leave off expressing its contempt for such a crude,
shallow, and preposterous conception. Perhaps in another hundred
years we shall learn to admire the good sense, endurance, and thorough
Englishness of organism in having been so averse to change, even more
than its versatility in having been willing to change so much.
Nevertheless, however conservative we may be, and however much
alive to the folly and wickedness of tampering with settled
convictions-no matter what they are-without sufficient cause, there is
yet such a constant though gradual change in our surroundings as
necessitates corresponding modification in our ideas, desires, and
actions. We may think that we should like to find ourselves always in
the same surroundings as our ancestors, so that we might be guided at
every touch and turn by the experience of our race, and be saved from
all self-communing or interpretation of oracular responses uttered by
the facts around us. Yet the facts will change their utterances in spite of
us; and we, too, change with age and ages in spite of ourselves, so as to
see the facts around us as perhaps even more changed than they
actually are. It has been said, "Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in

illis." The passage would have been no less true if it had stood, "Nos
mutamur et tempora mutantur in nobis." Whether the organism or the
surroundings began changing first is a matter of such small moment
that the two may be left to fight it out between themselves; but,
whichever view is taken, the fact will remain that whenever the
relations between the organism and its surroundings have been changed,
the organism must either succeed in putting the surroundings into
harmony with itself, or itself into harmony with the surroundings; or
must be made so uncomfortable as to be unable to remember itself as
subjected to any such difficulties, and there fore to die through inability
to recognise [sic] its own identity further.
Under these circumstances, organism must act in one or other of these
two ways: it must either change slowly and continuously with the
surroundings, paying cash for everything,