Toward the Gulf | Page 7

traps of logic,?And a wit with an adder's tongue,?And a laugher,?And an unafraid facer of enemies,?Oppositions, hatreds,?She never knew her equal.?She was at once very cruel, and very tender,?Very selfish and very generous?Very little and very magnanimous.?Scrupulous as to the truth, and utterly disregardless of the truth.
Of the keenest intuitions, yet gullible,?Easily used at times, of erratic judgment,?Analytic but pursuing with incredible swiftness?The falsest trails to her own undoing--?All in all the strangest mixture of colors and scent?Derived from father and mother,?But mixed by whom, and how, and why?
Now for the son named Herman, rebel soul.?His brow was like a loaf of bread, his eyes?Turned from his father's blue to gray, his nose?Was like his mother's, skin was dark like hers.?His shapely body, hands and feet belonged?To some patrician face, not to Marat's.?And his was like Marat's, fanatical,?Materialistic, fierce, as it might guide?A reptile's crawl, but yet he crawled to peaks?Loving the hues of mists, but not the mists?His father loved. And being a rebel soul?He thought the world all wrong. A nothingness?Moving as malice marred the life of man.?'Twas man's great work to fight this Giant Fraud,?And all who praise and serve Him. 'Tis for man?To free the world from error, suffer, die?For liberty of thought. You see his mother?Is in possession of one part of him,?Or all of him for some time.
So he lives?Nursing the dream (like father he's a dreamer)?That genius fires him. All the while a gift?For analytics stored behind that brow,?That bulges like a loaf of bread, is all?Of which he well may boast above the man?He hates as but a slave of faith and fear.?He feeds luxurious doubt with Omar Khyam,?But for long years neglects the jug of wine.?And as for "thou" he does not wake for years,?Is a pure maiden when he weds, the grains?Run counter in him, end in knots at times.?He takes from father certain tastes and traits,?From mother certain others, one can see?His mother's sex re-actions to his father,?Not passed to him to make him celibate,?But holding back in sleeping passions which?Burst over bounds at last in lust, not love.?Not love since that great engine in the brow?Tears off the irised wings of love and bares?The poor worm's body where the wings had been:?What is it but desire? Such stuff in rhyme?In music over what is but desire,?And ends when that is satisfied!
He's a crank.?And follows all the psychic thrills which run?To cackles o'er the world. It's Looking Backward,?Or Robert Elsmere, Spencer's Social Statics,?It's socialism, Anarchism, Peace,?It's non-resistance with a swelling heart,?As who should say how truer to the faith?Of Jesus am I, without hope or faith,?Than churchmen. He's a prohibitionist,?The poor's protagonist, the knight at arms?Of fallen women, yelling at the rich?Whose wicked greed makes all the prostitutes--?No prostitutes without the wicked rich!?But as he ages, as the bitter days?Approach with perorations: O ye vipers,?The engine in him changes all the world,?Reverses all the wheels of thought behind.?For Nietzsche comes, and makes him superman.?He dumps the truth of Jesus over--there?It lies with his youth's textual skepticism,?And laughter at the supernatural.
Now what's the motivating principle?Of such a mind? In youth he sought for rules?Wherewith to trail and capture truths. He found it?In James McCosh's Logic, it was this:?Lex Exclusi Tertii aut Medii,?Law of Excluded Middle speaking plain:?A thing is true, or not true, never a third?Hypothesis, so God is or is not.?That's very good to start with, how to end?And how to know which of the two is false--?He hunted out the false, as mother did--?Requires a tool. He found it in this book,?Reductio ad absurdum; let us see?Excluded middle use reductio.?God is or God is not, but then what God??Excluded Middle never sought a God?To suffer demolition at his hands?Except the God of Illinois, the God?Grown but a little with his followers?Since Moses lived and Peter fished. So now?God is or God is not. Let us assume?God is and use reductio ad absurdum,?Taking away the rotten props, the posts?That do not fit or hold, and let Him fall.?For if he falls, the other postulate?That God is not is demonstrated. See?A universe of truth pass on the way?Cleared by Excluded Middle through the stuff?Of thought and visible things, a way that lets?A greater God escape, uncaught by all?The nippers of reductio ad absurdum.?But to resume his argument was this:?God is or God is not, but if God is?Why pestilence and war, earthquake and famine??He either wills them, or cannot prevent them,?But if he wills them God is evil, if?He can't prevent them, he is limited.
But God, you say, is good, omnipotent,?And here I prove Him evil, or too weak?To stay the evil. Having shown your God?Lacking in what makes God, the proposition?Which I oppose to this, that God is not?Stands proven. For as evil is most clear?In sickness, pain and