INCONGRUITY INCARNATE. 415 all be des saints ou des scélérats. In every age, according to Michelet,—with Gerson for his text,-it is the mission of the greatest man of his day to be the expression of the contradictions, real or apparent, of our nature. Gibbon, in his essay on the Study of Literature, exposes the fallacy of imputing logical coherence and unity to the characters studied: design has been perceived in the actions of a distinguished man, a predominant trait has been found in his character; and then closet speculators have immediately wanted to make all men as systematic beings in practice as they are in theory, and have discovered art in their passions, policy in their weaknesses, and dissimulation in their inconstancy; in a word, "by dint of paying homage to the intellect of man, they have often done very little honour to his heart." Now it is, as Macaulay was fond of insisting, a sheer impossibility to reason from the opinions which a man professes to his feelings and his actions; and in fact" no person is ever such a fool as to reason thus, except when he wants a pretext for persecuting his neighbours,”—and then he lays to the charge of his victims all the vices and follies to which their doctrines, however remotely, seem to tend. As no man in the world acts up to his own standard of right, argues Macaulay in another place, there is an enormous gap in the logic by which alone penalties for opinions can be defended. Reason the matters as we may, experience shows us *—to cite another illustration from the same fertile reasoner —that a man may believe in election without believing in reprobation, that he may believe in reprobation without being an Antinomian, and that he may be an Antinomian without being a bad citizen.† Man, in short, he concludes, is so in * So David Hartley appeals to the fact that in the writings of so many good men we see philosophical free-will asserted, on the one hand, and merit disclaimed on the other; in both cases, with a view to avoid consequences apparently impious; though it be impossible to reconcile these doctrines to each other.-Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind, ch. v., sect. v. + There was not, says Middleton, a more declared enemy to Epicurus's doctrine than Cicero: he thought it destructive of morality and pernicious to society; but he charged this consequence to the principles, not the professors of them, with many of whom he was extremely intimate, and whom consistent a creature, that it is impossible to reason from his belief to his conduct, or from one part of his belief to another. Some one has said, that if a conjuror with powers hitherto unknown were to arise, able to draw us a map of the mind of a cultivated man, exhibiting all the propositions that he accepts point-blank, with the grounds on which he believes them to be true, all the vague half-conceived maxims on which he regulates his conduct, and all that wide region of inarticulate impulse, changing proclivity in this direction and in that, by which so much of human activity is directed—why, such a conjuror would produce a picture of incoherency, incongruity, baselessness, shadowiness, and contradiction of an altogether incredible sort. Even without any more magical powers than candour and penetration, it has been further remarked, a plain man, looking into himself, may discern in his own motives of action and principles of belief a curious and rather humiliating chaos. He would see, for instance, that he unconsciously acted under certain circumstances on a maxim which he energetically repudiated then as in every other case; that he held some leading belief on the strength of ideas which, if they were solid and true, would be destructive of all his other leading beliefs; that he grasped, as proof of some set of facts, at a kind of evidence which he unqualifiedly rejects in the case of some precisely similar set of facts, and so forth. In a suggestive treatise on Mental Growth, stress is laid on the truth that great mental development or change does not instantaneously correct all our character or all our ideas; and that, whether in politics, philosophy, or theology, all of us, with scarcely an exception, serve in reality two masters, and belong to two he esteemed as worthy, virtuous, generous friends, and lovers of their country. Conyers Middleton takes occasion, after quoting Cicero's letter to Trebatius, to contrast the tone of it with the "rashness of those zealots who, with the light of a most divine and benevolent religion, are perpetually insulting and persecuting their fellow-Christians, for differences of opinion which for the most part are merely speculative and without any influence on life, or the good and happiness of civil society."-Life of Cicero, ii., sect. vii. THE INCONSEQUENT CREATURE, MAN. 417 régimes: the old and new Adam co-exist in us :* reluctant proselytes of the new, we are affectionate deserters from the old; and we partially live in the pleasant shade of old influences. "The fact is, that it is impossible to say that the mind of any human being is fitted and furnished on logical principles. It is rather a sort of lumber room or bazaar.” Men think inconsistently enough up to the time when their attention is forcibly drawn to the inconsistency; and then, perhaps, if we are active and honest, we set slowly and methodically to work to repair the incongruity, and to make our opinions dovetail into one another. But to the very end of our career the charge holds good of there being certain ways of thinking which we cannot make dovetail decently, do what we will with them. Intellectually, as morally, man is to the end an inconsequent creature. In either aspect there is comedy as well as tragedy in the study of him. It is of the moral aspect, mainly, and in at least a semi-tragic tone, or a semi-tone of the tragical, that the poet is treating, when thus he apostrophizes the race : * 66 O Man, Creation's paradox! How reconcile thy struggling chaos-how As are the brutes; then with clear earnest brow Scaling great heights of generosity; Thou fiend-thou god-why poorly rovest thou Beyond thyself in search of mystery? What riddle can be worth, or wondrous after thee?" Sir A. Helps urges great caution in reminding those who now would fain be wiser, of their rash and censorious judgments in times past-especially the young, who, never having felt the mutability of all human things, nor discovered that a man's former certainties are among the strangest things he looks back upon in the vista of the past, nor again having dreamed that the way to some opinions may lie through their opposites, are mightily ashamed of inconsistency, and may be made to look upon reparation as a crime."-Essays written in the Intervals of Business, p. 49. 66 RECOGNISED FELLOWSHIP IN SUFFERING. T. PETER would have those to whom he wrote his first epistle take comfort and find strength in the reflection. that, so far from being singular in suffering, the same afflictions were being undergone by their brethren elsewhere, if not everywhere. St. Paul assures his Corinthian brethren that no temptation, or trial (Tepaσpòs), had taken them, but such as is common to man (ei μǹ åvôpóñivos). Recognised fellowship in suffering is, on double apostolical authority, a signal solace to the suffering. A clerical poet ventures to doubt the efficacy, speaking for himself, of this kind of consolation, and deprecates the principle of it, as well as demurs to its practical worth: "There are who try to comfort you By saying, others suffer too; And but one joy from pain I strike, That with mankind I share alike." But to the mass of men it is always a consolatory assurance. that our amount of unhappiness is not greater than that of most other people, and that what we to our cost are feeling others have felt, and others are to feel. Milton's Satan, how ever, may be cited as an authority the other way, when he scouts the charge of being prompted by envy to ruin the happy, and thus to gain companions of his misery and woe At first it might have been so, he admits : without being greatly stayed or soothed by that fellowship in suffering. Yet does the adage hold good, as an adage, Commune naufragium omnibus est consolatio. There is an absolute use of St. Peter's expression, "as though some strange thing had happened unto you," in Cicero's reminder that, when overtaken by inevitable misfortunes, we can at least fortify ourselves by remembrance of parallel cases, and so, eventis aliorum memoriâ repetendis, NIHIL NOVI accidisse nobis cogitemus. Mr. Disraeli calls it agreeable to see others falling into the same traps which have broken our own shins; and that, shipwrecked on the island of our hopes, one likes to mark a vessel go down in full sight.* “'Tis demonstration that we are not branded as Cains among the favoured race of man." According to Wordsworth,— "The mind condemned, without reprieve, to go With sad congratulation joins the train Where beasts and men together o'er the plain Move on a mighty caravan of pain: Hope, strength, and courage social suffering brings, The picture, if unpleasant, is yet pleasanter than Mr. Procter's, of "A ghastly brotherhood who hung together, Knit firm by misery or some common wrong." To have partners in misfortune is some comfort, says Dio Chrysostom: Пapaμvðíav Pépei τὸ κοινωνοὺς εἶναι τῶν συμφορῶν; Οr, as the Latin proverb words * "That old Frenchman was right," mutters another author's Captain Bulstrode, thinking of La Rochefoucauld's maxim; "there is a great satisfaction in the misfortune of others. If I go to my dentist, I like to find another wretch in the waiting-room; and I like to have my tooth extracted first, and to see him glare enviously at me as I come out of the torture chamber, knowing that my troubles are over, while his are to come." Of the ducal philosopher's maxim, more anon. |