Without Prejudice | Page 9

Action is substance and
thought shadow." And so--paradoxically enough--I began to think out
A WORKING PHILOSOPHY
The solar system turns without thine aid. Live, die! The universe is not
afraid. What is is right! If aught seems wrong below, Then wrong it
is--of thee to leave it so. Then wrong it first becomes for human
thought, Which else would die of dieting on naught. Tied down by race
and sex and creed and station, Go, learn to find thy strength in
limitation, To do the little good that comes to hand, Content to love and
not to understand; Faithful to friends and country, work and dreams,
Knowing the Real is the thing that seems. While reverencing every
nobleness, In whatsoever tongue or shape or dress, Speak out the word
that to thy soul seems right, Strike out thy path by individual light: 'Tis
contradictory rays that give the White.
"The ideas are good. But what a pity you are not a poet!" said my
friend the Poet.
But, though I recognise that prejudice in the deepest sense supplies the
matter of judgment, while logic is only regulative of the form, yet in
the more work-a-day sense of the word in which prejudice is taken to
mean an opinion formed without reasoning and maintained in despite
of it, I claim to write absolutely without prejudice. The syllogism is my
lord and king. A kind-hearted lady said I had a cruel face. It is true. I
am absolutely remorseless in tracking down a non sequitur, pitiless in
forcing data to yield up their implicit conclusions. "Logic! Logic!"

snorted my friend the Poet. "Life is not logical. We cannot be logical."
"Of course not," said I; "I should not dream of asking men to live
logically: all I ask is that they should argue logically."
But to be unprejudiced does not mean to have no convictions. The
superficial confuse definiteness with prejudice, forgetting that definite
opinions may be the result of careful judgment. Post-judiced I trust I
am. But prejudiced? Heaven forfend! Why, 'tis because I do not wish to
bind myself to anything that I may say in them that I mark these
personal communications "Without Prejudice"! For I do not at all mind
contradicting myself. If it were some one of reverend years or superior
talents I might hesitate, but between equals----! Contradiction is the
privilege of camaraderie and the essence of causerie. We agree to
differ--I and myself. I am none of your dogmatic fellows with
pigeon-holes for minds, and whatever I say I do not stick to. And I will
tell you why. There is hardly a pretty woman of my acquaintance who
has not asked for my hand. Owing to this passion for palmistry in polite
circles, I have discovered that I possess as many characters as there are
palmists. Do you wonder, therefore, if, with such a posse of
personalities to pick from, I am never alike two days running? With so
varied a psychological wardrobe at command, it would be mere
self-denial to be faithful to one's self. I leave that to the one-I'd who can
see only one side of a question. Said Tennyson to a friend (who printed
it): "'In Memoriam' is more optimistic than I am"; and there is more of
the real man in that little remark than in all the biographies. The
published prophet has to live up to his public halo. So have I seen an
actress on tour slip from a third-class railway carriage into a brougham.
Tennyson was not mealy-mouthed, but then he did not bargain for an
audience of phonographs. Nowadays it is difficult to distinguish your
friends from your biographers. The worst of it is that the land is thick
with fools who think nothing of a great man the moment they discover
he was a man. Tennyson was all the greater for his honest doubt. The
cocksure centuries are passed for ever. In these hard times we have to
work for our opinions; we cannot rely on inheriting them from our
fathers.
I write with a capital I at the risk of being accused of egotism.

Apparently it is more modest to be conceited in the third person, like
the child who says "Tommy is a good boy," or in the first person plural,
like the leader-writer of "The Times," who bids the Continent tremble
at his frown. By a singular fallacy, which ought scarcely to deceive
children, it is forgotten that everything that has ever been written since
the world began has been written by some one person, by an "I,"
though that "I" might have been omitted from the composition or
replaced by the journalistic "we." To some extent the journalist does
sink his personality in that imaginary personality of his paper, a
personality built